Marshall Mcluhan

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.

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

Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.

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

For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.

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 new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.

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.

Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.

We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.

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.

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.

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

We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to loose.

The computer is the most extraordinary of man's technological clothing; it's an extension of our central nervous system. Beside it, the wheel is a mere hula-hoop.

There is no more great men; there is only great committees.

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.

The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.

the only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions

There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.