1911-1980, Canadian Communications Theorist
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 – [Etiquette]
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
Marshall Mcluhan – [Opinions]
A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.
Marshall Mcluhan – [Books and Reading]
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
Marshall Mcluhan – [Arts and Artists]
Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.
Marshall Mcluhan – [Advertising]
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.
Marshall Mcluhan – [Elections]
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 – [Appetite]
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.
Marshall Mcluhan – [Arts and Artists]
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 – [Arts and Artists]
Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
Marshall Mcluhan – [Obscurity]
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
Marshall Mcluhan – [Babies]
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
Marshall Mcluhan – [Experience]
For those for whom the sex act has come to seem mechanical and merely the meeting and manipulation of body parts, there often remains a hunger which can be called metaphysical but which is not recognized as such, and which seeks satisfaction in physical danger, or sometimes in torture, suicide, or murder.
Marshall Mcluhan – [Sex]
For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
Marshall Mcluhan – [Time and Time Management]
Good taste is the first refuge of the non creative. It is the last ditch stand of the artist.
Marshall Mcluhan – [Taste]
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 – [Advertising]
If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.
Marshall Mcluhan – [Psychiatry]
It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.
Marshall Mcluhan – [Critics and Criticism]
It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudosimplicities of brutal directness.
Marshall Mcluhan – [Candor]
Jokes are grievances.
Marshall Mcluhan – [Jokes and Jokers]