Marshall McLuhan Quotes Page 2

“We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

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

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

“Language is metaphor in the sense that it not only stores but translates experience from one mode into another. Money is metaphor in the sense that it stores skill and labour and also translates one skill into another.”

“Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.”

“They will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.”

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

“Art is anything you can get away with.”

“Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.”

“The medium is the message.”

“The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.”

“To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.”

“Work does not exist in a non-literate 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.”

“One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.”