Many a good argument is ruined by some fool who knows what he is talking about.
— Marshall McLuhan
We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.
— Marshall McLuhan
Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.
— Marshall McLuhan
I don't necessarily agree with everything that I say.
— Marshall McLuhan
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.
— Marshall McLuhan
We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.
— Marshall McLuhan
Money is just the poor man's credit card.
— Marshall McLuhan
Television is teaching all the time. Does more educating than the schools and all the institutions of higher learning.
— Marshall McLuhan
The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.
— Marshall McLuhan
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.
— Marshall McLuhan
Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher.
— Marshall McLuhan
The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.
— Marshall McLuhan
Youth instinctively understand the present environment - the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.
— Marshall McLuhan
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
— Marshall McLuhan
Most people are alive in an earlier time, but you must be alive in our own time.
— Marshall McLuhan
The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.
— Marshall McLuhan
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.
— Marshall McLuhan
Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.
— Marshall McLuhan
Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.
— Marshall McLuhan
Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.
— Marshall McLuhan
There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends,
— Marshall McLuhan
We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
— Marshall McLuhan
Like primitive, we now live in a global village of our own making, a simultaneous happening. It doesn't necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else's affairs.
— Marshall McLuhan
Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
— Marshall McLuhan
There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
— Marshall McLuhan
The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement.
— Marshall McLuhan
Don't ask whether it is right or wrong. Instead try to find out what is going on.
— Marshall McLuhan
I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form.
— Marshall McLuhan
All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.
— Marshall McLuhan
World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.
— Marshall McLuhan
The mother tongue is propaganda.
— Marshall McLuhan
All discoveries in art and science result from an accumulation of errors.
— Marshall McLuhan
Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.
— Marshall McLuhan
A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters.
— Marshall McLuhan
The future of work consists of learning a living.
— Marshall McLuhan
The greatest propaganda in the world is our mother tongue, that is what we learn as children, and which we learn unconsciously. That shapes our perceptions for life. That is propaganda at its most extreme form.
— Marshall McLuhan
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.
— Marshall McLuhan
When people become too intense, too serious, they will have trouble in relating to any sort of social game or norm. Perhaps this is why jokes are so important. On one hand they tell us about where the problems and grievances are, and, at the same time, they provide the means of enduring these grievances by laughing at the problems.
— Marshall McLuhan
Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.
— Marshall McLuhan
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.
— Marshall McLuhan