Quotes from Marshall McLuhan

It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter.

The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.

Since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human experience.

Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.

The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation.

The school system is the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.

We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's jobs with yesterday's tools.

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.

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

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.

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

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

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.

Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

You can be a French Canadian or an English Canadian, but not a Canadian. We know how to live without an identity, and this is one of our marvellous resources.

The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.

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.

The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.

The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.