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

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

Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.

Marshall McLuhan

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 ...

Marshall McLuhan

Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.

Marshall McLuhan

Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.

Marshall McLuhan

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.

Marshall McLuhan

The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.

Marshall McLuhan

The present is only faced in any generation by the artist.

Marshall McLuhan

The job of art is not to store moments of experience but to explore environments that are otherwise invisible. Art is not a retrieval system of precious moments of past cultures. Art has a live, ongoing function. McLuhan CD-ROM

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...

Marshall McLuhan

In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.

Marshall McLuhan

We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.

Marshall McLuhan

I don't necessarily agree with everything that I say.

Marshall McLuhan

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools!

Marshall McLuhan

All words, in every language, are metaphors.

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