Marshall McLuhan Quotes

The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.

The power of the media is really the only new issue in the last 50 years, probably.

Whoever controls the media—the images—controls the culture.

The state must not ... let itself be confused by the drivel about so-called "freedom of the press," ... it must make sure of this instrument of popular education, and place it in the service of the state.

All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations

The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen, and the far spread magazine, rules the country.

I used to believe that we could change the media. I was as naive as anybody.

The new media are not ways of relating to us the 'real' world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.

The media is not going to change.

We live in a media culture and whoever controls and influences and uses media the best has the power for change.

It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale.

There are ways that we can manipulate the corporate media to talk about the issues that we care about.

Technology is rooted in the past. It dominates the present and tends into the future. It is a real historical movement - one of the great movements which shape and represent their epoch.

That's the scary part about TV, how you'll feel about it in six years.

The notion of the Internet as a force of political and social revolution is not a new one. As far back as the early 1990s, in the early days of the World Wide Web, there were technologists and writers arguing forcefully that the Internet was destined to become the most important tool for cultural change in human history.

Obviously technology has become such a big presence in our lives and, I definitely know, in my life.

Television enjoys a de facto monopoly on what goes into the heads of a significant part of the population and what they think.

News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.

I'm writing a film. With our access to these powerful media, we're going to take over, because it's really disgusting what is put out there now to be consumed.

To the small group of editors and designers who would launch Wired in January 1993, technology represented the future's best hope; but to the media, the tech boom was yesterday's story.

Power in America today is control of the means of communication.

The press ... is but the servant of human intellect and its ministry is for good or evil, according to the character of those who direct it. The press is a mill that grinds all that is put into its hopper. Fill the hopper with poisoned grain and it will grind it to meal, but there is death in the bread.

The nation whose population depends on the explosively compressed headline service of television news can expect to be exploited by the demagogues and dictators who prey upon the semi-informed.

The media can make or break an administration.

What matters to the press matters perforce to politicians.