Quotes from Marshall McLuhan

There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.

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

The medium is the message.

Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.

One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.

Many a good argument is ruined by some fool who knows what he is talking about.

First we build the tools, then they build us.

Art is anything you can get away with.

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

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

We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish.

Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.

There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.

All words, in every language, are metaphors.

Our technology forces us to live mythically

I am an intellectual thug who has been slowly accumulating a private arsenal with every intention of using it. In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon. Every man of good will is the enemy of society.

The poet, the artist, the sleuth - whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely "well-adjusted", he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists between antisocial types in their power to see environments as they really are. This need to interface, to confront environments with a certain antisocial power is manifest in the famous story "The Emperor's New Clothes".

the only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions

All media are extensions of some human faculty- psychic or physical.

Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.

The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.

Diaper spelled backwards is repaid , think about it.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.