Quotes & anectdotes from
the wise,
the foolish,
the courageous &
the drunk

Marshall McLuhan Philosopher

  • Gender: Male
  • Citizenship: Canada
  • Born: Jul 21, 1911
  • Died: Dec 31, 1980

Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC was a Canadian philosopher of communication theory and a public intellectual. His work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries.

McLuhan is known for coining the expressions the medium is the message and the global village, and for predicting the World Wide Web almost thirty years before it was invented. Although he was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, his influence began to wane in the early 1970s. In the years after his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. With the arrival of the internet, however, interest in his work and perspective has renewed.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

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.

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

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

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.

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 just the poor man's credit card.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

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

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

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.

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

Art is anything you can get away with.

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

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

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

Money is a poor man's credit card.

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