Quotes from Marshall McLuhan

The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.

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

Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness.

Canadians are the people who learned to live without the bold accents of the natural ego-trippers of other lands.

Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.

Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to loose.

Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.

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.

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

'Money talks' because money is a metaphor, a transfer, and a bridge.

Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America—not on the battlefields of Vietnam.

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

Affluence creates poverty.

We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.

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

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

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

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.

There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV…. Hot media are… low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.

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

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.'

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.

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

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