Marshall McLuhan citations

Page 2

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

“Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.”

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

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

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot… for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.”

“American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.”

“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.”

“The medium is the message.”

“Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.”

“Many a good argument is ruined by some fool who knows what he is talking about.”

“We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish.”

“Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.”

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

“Art is whatever you can get away with.”

“Our technology forces us to live mythically”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Our permanent address is tommorrow.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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