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
Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts. - Marshall McLuhan
The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty. - Marshall McLuhan
The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf. - Marshall McLuhan
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
Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation. - Marshall McLuhan
For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role. - Marshall McLuhan
The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way. - Marshall McLuhan
The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar. - Marshall McLuhan
The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village. - Marshall McLuhan
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 to it. - 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
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
Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition. - Marshall McLuhan
Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor. - Marshall McLuhan
Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities. - Marshall McLuhan
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
As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.' - Marshall McLuhan