Marshall McLuhan Quotes

"Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor."

"Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the "Tower of Babel" by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant tr"

"All words, in every language, are metaphors."

"Publication is a self-invasion of privacy."

"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say."

"A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion."

"Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities."

"Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies."

"The medium is the message."

"When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves."

"The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb."

"We drive into the future using only our rear view mirror."

"Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy."

"ONLY THE SMALL SECRETS NEED TO BE PROTECTED.THE BIG ONES ARE KEPT SECRET BY PUBLIC INCREDULITY."

"Jokes are grievances."

"Affluence creates poverty."

"Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers."

"The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action,"

"The wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye; clothing, an extension of the skin, electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system"

"Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior."