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

Art is anything you can get away with.

Marshall McLuhan

To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.

Marshall McLuhan

Rationality or consciousness is itself a ratio or proportion among the sensuous components of experience, and is not something added to such sense experience. Subrational beings have no means of achieving such a ratio or proportion in their sense liv...

Marshall McLuhan

With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the cent...

Marshall McLuhan

One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.

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

The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.

Marshall McLuhan

The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.

Marshall McLuhan

We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.

Marshall McLuhan

I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.

Marshall McLuhan

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

Marshall McLuhan

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

Marshall McLuhan

Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.

Marshall McLuhan

A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.

Marshall McLuhan

The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.

Marshall McLuhan

Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.

Marshall McLuhan

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

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.

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