Quotes from Marshall McLuhan

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

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

The present is only faced in any generation by the artist.

The artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual attitudes.

As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art.

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.

The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.

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.

In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.

The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds.

Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.

Our motor car is our supreme form of privacy when we are away from home.

Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener.

Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.

What goes on inside the school is an interruption of education.

Education is civil defence against media fallout.

Education in a technological world of replaceable and expendable parts is neuter.

Education, which should be helping youth to understand and adapt to their revolutionary new environments, is instead being used merely as an instrument of cultural aggression.