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

A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
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

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
Marshall McLuhan

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

An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.
Marshall McLuhan


Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.
Marshall McLuhan

Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.
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 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.'
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

Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
Marshall McLuhan

Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
Marshall McLuhan

Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
Marshall McLuhan