The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
— Marshall McLuhan
For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.
Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.
Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.
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.
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.
Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.
Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.
Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
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.
We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
Money is just the poor man's credit card.
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
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.
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.
Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.
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.
It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.
A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.
The medium is the message.
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.
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.
Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.
Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.
Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.
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.
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.'
The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.
Money is a poor man's credit card.
The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.
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.
Jokes are grievances.
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.
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.
We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
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.
