Quotes from Marshall McLuhan

The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.

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.

Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.

Jokes are grievances.

Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.

Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.

When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

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.

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

It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudo-simplicities of brutal directness.

World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.

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

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

Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last ditch stand of the artist.

Violence is the quest for identity. When identity disappears with technological innovation, violence is the natural recourse.

The medium is the message.

A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.

Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of U.S.A. - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.

All discoveries in art and science result from an accumulation of errors.

The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.

Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.

Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure.