Quotes by Marshall McLuhan

About Marshall McLuhan:

Herbert Marshall McLuhan is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries. He was educated at the University of Manitoba and Cambridge University and began his teaching career as a Professor of English at several universities in the U.S. and Canada, before moving to the University of Toronto where he would remain for the rest of his life.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what’s happening. Because I don’t choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, ...

Marshall McLuhan

The greatest discovery of the 21st century will be the discovery that Man was not meant to live at the speed of light.

Marshall McLuhan

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

Marshall McLuhan

It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. Tranquilizers and anesthetics, private and corporate, become the largest business in the world just as the world is a...

Marshall McLuhan

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.'

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

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

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Marshall McLuhan

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.

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

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

Marshall McLuhan

You and I are faced with one of those situations (which fortunately are not very numerous in one lifetime) which cannot possibly be adequately judged beforehand. It strikes me as a colossal gamble, or rather, a very great adventure. And personally I ...

Marshall McLuhan

It is not brains or intelligence that is needed to cope with the problems with Plato and Aristotle and all of their successors to the present have failed to confront. What is needed is a readiness to undervalue the world altogether. This is only poss...

Marshall McLuhan

Art is whatever you can get away with.

Marshall McLuhan

The poet, the artist, the sleuth - whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely "well-adjusted", he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists between antisocial types in their power to see environments as...

Marshall McLuhan

All media work us over completely.

Marshall McLuhan

Author Bio

  • NameMarshall McLuhan
  • DescriptionCanadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a communications theorist
  • BornJuly 21, 1918
  • DiedDecember 31, 1980
  • CountryCanada
  • ProfessionPhilosopher; Writer
  • AwardsMolson Prize; Companion Of The Order Of Canada