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Marshall McLuhan [1911-1980] Canadian

Rank: 11
Sociologist, Professor

Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC was a Canadian professor, philosopher, and public intellectual. His work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries.

Art, Technology, Age, Car, Communication, Space, Environmental, Experience, Failure, Future, Great, Independence, Money, Politics, Society, Travel, War

Quote	Tags	Rank
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.		101
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.	Age, Great	102
We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.		103
There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.	Space	104
The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.	Independence, Technology	105
We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.	Future	106
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.		107
The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.	Travel	108
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.	Technology	109
In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.	Age	110
Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.		111
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.	Society	112
Art is anything you can get away with.	Art	113
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.		114
I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.	Art	115
Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.	Art	116
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.		117
We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.		118
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.	Experience	119
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.		120
A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.		121
Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.		122
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.	Age	123
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.	Art	124
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.	War	125
The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.	Technology	126
Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.		201
Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.	Environmental	202
Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.		203
Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.		204
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.		205
The medium is the message.	Communication	206
Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.		207
I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.		208
The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.		209
Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.		210
I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.		211
The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.	Car	212
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.		213
Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.	Art	214
Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.		215
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.	Politics	216
If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.		217
Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.		218
Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.	Car, Failure	219
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.		220
Money is a poor man's credit card.		221
Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.		222
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.'	Technology	223
An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.		224
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.		225
For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.	Space	226
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.	Communication	301
Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.		302
It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.	Technology	303
The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.		304
Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.		305
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.		306
Affluence creates poverty.	Money	307
Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.		308
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.		309
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.		310
Jokes are grievances.		311
Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.		312
The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.		313
The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.		314
Money is just the poor man's credit card.		315
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.		316
The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.		317

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