A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.
Marshall McLuhan
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
Marshall McLuhan
Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men-of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure.
Marshall McLuhan
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
Marshall McLuhan
Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
Marshall McLuhan
Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.
Marshall McLuhan
Affluence creates poverty.
Marshall McLuhan
Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.
Marshall McLuhan
Any ad consciously attended to is comical. Ads are not meant for conscious consumption. They are intended as subliminal pills for the subconsious in order to exercise an hypnotic spell, especially on sociologists.
Marshall McLuhan
Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.
Marshall McLuhan
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.
Marshall McLuhan
Art is anything you can get away with.
Marshall McLuhan
As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.
Marshall McLuhan
Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
Marshall McLuhan
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
Marshall McLuhan
Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community.
Marshall McLuhan
Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.
Marshall McLuhan
Good wine needs no bush, and perhaps products that people really want need no hard-sell or soft-sell TV push. Why not? Look at pot.
Marshall McLuhan
Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
Marshall McLuhan
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.
Marshall McLuhan
I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
Marshall McLuhan
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.
Marshall McLuhan
Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness.
Marshall McLuhan
If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.
Marshall McLuhan
Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.
Marshall McLuhan
It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudosimplicities of brutal directness.
Marshall McLuhan
Jokes are grievances.
Marshall McLuhan
Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.
Marshall McLuhan
Money is just the poor man's credit card.
Marshall McLuhan
Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
Marshall McLuhan
Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's jobs with yesterday's tools.
Marshall McLuhan
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.
Marshall McLuhan
Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.
Marshall McLuhan
Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.
Marshall McLuhan
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.
Marshall McLuhan
The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds.
Marshall McLuhan
The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete.
Marshall McLuhan
The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
Marshall McLuhan
The medium is the message.
Marshall McLuhan
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.
Marshall McLuhan
The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.
Marshall McLuhan
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
Marshall McLuhan
The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
Marshall McLuhan
The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
Marshall McLuhan
The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.
Marshall McLuhan
The school system, custodian of print culture, has no place for the rugged individual. It is, indeed, the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.
Marshall McLuhan
The winner is one who knows when to drop out in order to get in touch.
Marshall McLuhan
There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
Marshall McLuhan
We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
Marshall McLuhan
We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
Marshall McLuhan
When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.
Marshall McLuhan
|
Type:
Sociologist
Date of Birth:
1911-07-21
Year of Death:
1980
Nationality:
Canadian |
