A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight andunderstanding.
Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools!
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver’s license age than at voting age.
Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.
In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.
I don’t necessarily agree with everything that I say.
Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.
The wheel… is an extension of the foot. The book… is an extension of the eye…Clothing, an extension of the skin…Electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.
The present is only faced in any generation by the artist.
To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.
I satirize at all times, and my hyperboles are as nothing compared to the events to which they refer.
The greatest discovery of the 21st century will be the discovery that Man was not meant to live at the speed of light.
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.
The job of art is not to store moments of experience but to explore environments that are otherwise invisible. Art is not a retrieval system of precious moments of past cultures. Art has a live, ongoing function. McLuhan CD-ROM
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver’s license age than at voting age.
Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.
You can be a French Canadian or an English Canadian but not a Canadian. We know how to live without an identity and this is one of our marvellous resources.
One matter Englishmen don’t think in the least funny is their happy consciousness of possessing a deep sense of humour.
It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudo-simplicities of brutal directness.
The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.
The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.
Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last ditch stand of the artist.
Violence is the quest for identity. When identity disappears with technological innovation violence is the natural recourse.
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of U.S.A. – not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America – not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person’s car is the only place where he can be alone and think.
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of ‘do it yourself.’
If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist’s couch.
Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools and yesterday’s concepts.
In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.
The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.
I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.
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 much more powerful than he could ever be.
The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.
It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.
Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.
The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.
We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.