Quotes from Marshall McLuhan

Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.

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

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

What is very little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software.

An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.

The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.

I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

Scarcity causes hardship, but affluence creates poverty.

Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.

Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.

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

In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.

The age of automation is going to be the age of "do it yourself".

As the age of information demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved.

In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud.

On Spaceship Earth there are no passengers; everybody is a member of the crew. We have moved into an age in which everybody's activities affect everybody else.

We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.

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.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

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

It is possible to deal with the entire environment as a work of art.

Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up--thatis our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice.