Marshall McLuhan: Trending quotes

Marshall McLuhan trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection
Marshall McLuhan: 832 quotes16 likes

“First we build the tools, then they build us.”

Marshall McLuhan

“Art is whatever you can get away with.”

Marshall McLuhan book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967)
Source: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Our technology forces us to live mythically”

Marshall McLuhan

“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967)

“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

“the only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: Take Today: The Executive as Dropout

“There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

Marshall McLuhan

The Medium is the Message (1967), A chapter sub-heading attributed by McLuhan to Alfred North Whitehead

“The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.”

Marshall McLuhan

“Diaper spelled backwards is repaid, think about it.”

Marshall McLuhan

“All words, in every language, are metaphors.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 120

“Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.”

Marshall McLuhan

quoted in Advertising Age, Sep. 3, 1976
1970s
Variant: Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century
Context: Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.

“Our permanent address is tommorrow.”

Marshall McLuhan

“All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967), p. 26
Source: The Medium is the Massage

“The mask, like the side-show freak, is mainly participatory rather than pictorial in its sensory appeal.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 352

“The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.”

Marshall McLuhan

The Critic, Volume 33, Thomas More Association, 1974, p. 12
1970s

“Color is not so much a visual as a tactile medium.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

“The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 98