Quotes from Marshall McLuhan

Only the vanquished remember history.

Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.

North Americans have a peculiar bias. They go outside to be alone and they go home to be social.

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

Anything that's popular is a rear-view image.

One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with.

Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force.

... Their power to see environments as they really are.

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.

Money is a poor man's credit card.

Money is just the poor man's credit card.

Affluence creates poverty.

The electric age ... established a global network that has much the character of our central nervous system.

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.

Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today.

The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.

The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

Technology is that which separates us from our environment.

The genteel is a mighty catafalque of service-with-a-smile and flattering solicitude smothering every spontaneous movement of thought or feeling.

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

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.

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

The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.

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.