Marshall McLuhan

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

“Art is anything you can get away with.”

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

“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.”

“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.'”

“Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts.”

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

“In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.”

“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.”

“Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.”

“Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.”

“Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.”

“Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.”

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

“We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.”

“Money is a poor man's credit card.”

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

“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.”

“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.”