Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Advertising, Abundance
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Artists, Art, Arts
‘Money talks’ because money is a metaphor, a transfer, and a bridge.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: One liners
The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Driving
The machine called Nature into an art form. For the first time at men began to regard Nature as a source of aesthetic and spiritual values.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Wilderness
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.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Politicians, Politics
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
Topics: Arts, Art, Artists
It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudo-simplicities of brutal directness.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Candor, Sincerity
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Information
The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Propaganda
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Opinions, Luxury, Opinion
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.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Manners
It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Critics, Art, Criticism
Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Media
Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Experience
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
Topics: Shopping
The real news is bad news.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Media, Journalism, Journalists
Most clear writing is a sign that there is no exploration going on. Clear prose indicates the absence of thought.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Writing
Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Work
The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Conformity
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
Topics: Information
Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Assumptions
Good taste is the first refuge of the non creative. It is the last ditch stand of the artist.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Taste, Style
Affluence creates poverty.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Poverty
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
Topics: Conscience
Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Science, Technology
Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to loose.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Awareness
If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist’s couch.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Psychiatry
Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Conversation, Eloquence
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Jacques Derrida French Philosopher, Literary Theorist
- Hans-Georg Gadamer German Philosopher
- Jose Ortega y. Gasset Spanish Philosopher
- Robertson Davies Canadian Novelist, Playwright
- John Rawls American Philosopher
- Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach German Philosopher
- Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel German Man of Letters
- Emanuel Swedenborg Swedish Mystic, Theologian, Scientist
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz German Philosopher, Mathematician
- Karl Marx German Philosopher, Economist
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