Quotes by Marshall McLuhan

"It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame."

"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."

"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."

"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.'"

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

"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."

"American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age."

"Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century."

"Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century."

"If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch."

"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."

"Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think."

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

"Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance."

"The medium is the message."

"In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness."

"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."

"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."

"Money is a poor man's credit card."

"Money is just the poor man's credit card."

"There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew."

"Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication."

"Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language."

"Art is anything you can get away with."

"We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror."

"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."

"A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion."

"Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either."

"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."

"Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities."

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

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