Marshall McLuhan Quotes

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

"The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar."

"A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them."

"It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame."

"We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us."

"The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist."

"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."

"Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness."

"A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new."

"Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression."

"New media may at first appear as mere codes of transmission for older achievement and established patterns of thought. But nobody could make the mistake of supposing that phonetic writing merely made it possible for the Greeks to set down in visual o"

"Class in society is determined by voice"

"Acoustic space has the basic character of a sphere whose focus or centre is simultaneously everywhere and whose margin is nowhere..."

"Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort."

"One matter Englishmen don't think in the least funny is their happy consciousness of possessing a deep sense of humor."

"The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium / that is, of any extension of ourselves / result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology."

"Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy."