Marshall McLuhan Quotes - Page 3

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.

I may be wrong, but I'm never in doubt.

The mother tongue is propaganda.

I don't want them to believe me, I just want them to think.

As a rule, I always look for what others ignore.

The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.

All words, in every language, are metaphors.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

What is very little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software.

Art is anything you can get away with.

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.

Invention is the mother of necessities.

"Work" does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.

The greatest propaganda in the world is our mother tongue, that is what we learn as children, and which we learn unconsciously. That shapes our perceptions for life. That is propaganda at its most extreme form.

Violence is the quest for identity. When identity disappears with technological innovation, violence is the natural recourse.

Those conspiracies that are too incredible to be believed, are by the same right, those which most often succeed.

Fish did not discover water.

The poet, the artist, the sleuth, whoever sharpens our perception tends to antisocial; rarely 'well adjusted,' he cannot go along with currents and trends.

Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher.

When people become too intense, too serious, they will have trouble in relating to any sort of social game or norm. Perhaps this is why jokes are so important. On one hand they tell us about where the problems and grievances are, and, at the same time, they provide the means of enduring these grievances by laughing at the problems.

The school system is the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.

The future of work consists of learning a living.

Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.

When information overload occurs, pattern recognition is how to determine truth.

Most people are alive in an earlier time, but you must be alive in our own time.