Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Marshall Mcluhan (Canadian Thinker)

Marshall Mcluhan (1911–80,) fully Herbert Marshall McLuhan, was a Canadian writer and thinker. He became well known in the 1960s for his maxim ‘the medium is the message’ and his contention that it is the characteristics of a particular medium rather than the information it disseminates influences and controls communities.

Born in Edmonton, Mcluhan studied English literature at the universities of Manitoba and Cambridge, and in 1946 became a professor at St Michael’s College, Toronto. In 1963, having led two examinations into culture and communication media, he was appointed director of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Culture and Technology.

Mcluhan held the controversial view that the invention of printing, with its emphasis on the eye rather than the ear, led to the destruction of a cohesive, interdependent society. He contended that it prompts humans to be more introspective, individualistic, and self-centered.

Mcluhan’s publications include The Mechanical Bride (1951,) The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962,) Understanding Media (1964,) The Medium is the Message (1967; with Q Fiore,) and Counter-Blast (1970.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Marshall Mcluhan

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.
Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Television

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

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

It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudo-simplicities of brutal directness.
Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Sincerity, Candor

Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.
Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Work

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver’s license age than at voting age.
Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Youth, Voting, Elections

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
Topics: Harmony, Aspirations, Advertising

The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Information

The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds.
Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Business

There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Earth

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

It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudo-simplicities of brutal directness.
Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Friendship, Candor

The real news is bad news.
Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Journalists, Journalism, Media

Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Experience

Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Babies, Family

Jokes are grievances.
Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Jokes, Humor

Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Eloquence, Conversation

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: Art, Arts, Artists

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
Topics: Shopping

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: Technology, Science

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.
Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Arts, Art, Artists

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Assumptions

The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Driving

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools.
Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Technology, Anxiety

Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.
Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Media, Advertising

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.
Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Enjoyment, Diet, Appetite

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values
Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Media

Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Space

The modern little red riding hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objections to being eaten by the wolf.
Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Advertising

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