Marshall McLuhan Quotes & Sayings (Page 5)

“Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.”

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

“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.”

“If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.”

“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.”

“Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.”