Marshall McLuhan Quotes

"In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness."

"Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century."

"The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future."

"Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men-of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure."

"The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man."

"Money is just the poor man's credit card."

"Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language."

"Art is anything you can get away with."

"Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity"

"The computer is the most extraordinary of man's technological clothing; it's an extension of our central nervous system. Beside it, the wheel is a mere hula-hoop."

"Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance."

"Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either."

"As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of "do it yourself"."

"One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with."

"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."

"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"

"Jokes are grievances."

"Affluence creates poverty."

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

"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."