Marshall McLuhan

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

“Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.”

“The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.”

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

“Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.”

“One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with.”

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

“When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.”

“The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.”

“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.”

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

“Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.”

“A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.”

“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 introduc...”

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