Marshall McLuhan Quotes

We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

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.

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.

World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.

People hope that if they scream loudly enough about "values" then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. Otherwise, why would they be screaming? Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity.

There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends.

There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.

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 so much more powerful than he could ever be.

The news automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself an immediate reality.

We go forward looking in the rearview mirror.

The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.

In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.

I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.

We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies.

Time’ has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village... a simultaneous happening

Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.

Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's problems.

Don't ask whether it is right or wrong. Instead try to find out what is going on.

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

Like primitive, we now live in a global village of our own making, a simultaneous happening. It doesn't necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else's affairs.

The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods.