Marshall McLuhan Quotes

“Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.”

“All words, in every language, are metaphors.”

“American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.”

“Diaper spelled backwards is repaid , think about it.”

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

“Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.”

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

“First we build the tools, then they build us.”

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

“I don't necessarily agree with everything that I say.”

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

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot... for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.”

“Many a good argument is ruined by some fool who knows what he is talking about.”

“Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.”

“Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.”

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

“Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools!”

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

“The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.”

“The literate man is a sucker for propaganda. You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas.”

“The mother tongue is propaganda.”

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

“The only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions.”

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

“There are no passengers on spaceship Earth. We are all crew.”

“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

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

“We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies.”

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

“We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish.”