There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
Marshall McLuhan
We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
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.
I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.
We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.
The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
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.
We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.
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.'
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
Art is anything you can get away with.
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.
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
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.
Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.
Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.
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.
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.
Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.
Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.
The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
Money is just the poor man's credit card.
Affluence creates poverty.
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.
The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds.
Jokes are grievances.
Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.
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.
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.
If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.
The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.
I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
