Marshall McLuhan Quotes - Page 5

First we build the tools, then they build us.

Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.

Innovation for holders of conventional wisdom is not novelty but annihilation.

The 'content' of any medium is always another medium.

Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.

Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, / Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? / That we by tracing magic lines are taught, / How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?

Only the vanquished remember history.

On Spaceship Earth there are no passengers; everybody is a member of the crew. We have moved into an age in which everybody's activities affect everybody else.

All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.

It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it isolates single moments in time.

Television is teaching all the time. Does more educating than the schools and all the institutions of higher learning.

If men were able to be convinced that art is a precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artist? Or would they begin a careful translation of new art forms into social navigation charts? I am curious to know what would happem if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties.

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

It has always been the artist who realizes that the future is the present and uses his work to prepare the grounds for it

The electric age ... established a global network that has much the character of our central nervous system.

Our permanent address is tommorrow.

The story begins only when the book closes.

Some of my fellow academics are very hostile, but I sympathize with them. They've been asleep for 500 years and they don't like anybody who comes along and stirs them up.

The ignorance of how to use knowledge stockpiles exponentially.

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

People don't actually read newspapers - they get into them every morning like a hot bath.

Money is a poor man's credit card.

I do not explain, I explore.

Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today.

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