Marshall McLuhan

“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.”

“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 directi...”

“Affluence creates poverty.”

“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 infallibl...”

“Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.”

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

“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 electroni...”

“The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.”

“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.”

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

“All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.”

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

“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 occasio...”

“Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.”

“Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.”

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

“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.”

“Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.”

“Money is just the poor man's credit card.”

“Money is a poor man's credit card.”