Marshall McLuhan Quotes, Thoughts and images

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

The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

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

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

There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.

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

Photography turns people into things and their image into a mass consumer product.

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

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

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

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

We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies.

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

We go forward looking in the rearview mirror.

The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.

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

Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.

What is very little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software.

All advertising advertises advertising.

Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.

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

Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's problems.

Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.

It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudosimplicities of brutal directness.

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.

The most human thing about us is our technology.

Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.

I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.

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

the only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions

What goes on inside the school is an interruption of education.

Time’ has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village... a simultaneous happening

One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with.

The poet, the artist, the sleuth, whoever sharpens our perception tends to antisocial; rarely 'well adjusted,' he cannot go along with currents and trends.