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.

The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.

It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Money is a poor man's credit card.

Money is just the poor man's credit card.

We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.

Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

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

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 the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.

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.

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.

Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.