Marshall McLuhan Quotes

In college, I majored - I can't believe there is such a thing - in advertising. And I worked in advertising and PR for a while, and I liked it.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

Advertising was only meant to be a very small part of my life. I had intended that I would work extensively in journalism for about five or six years and then I'd become a writer.

I have learned that any fool can write a bad ad, but that it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one.

I started small with commercials and print.

One of the things that we hope to do with 'Pitchmen' is to give people an appreciation of what we do.

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

I began to see that the short texts I was writing were poster material.

Commercials capture your attention, that's all.

Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.

Part of politics is redundancy. You’ve got to say the same thing over and over even if you get tired of it…not everyone has heard it.

Power comes through public persuasion.

There is interposed between the voter and hid final judgment the whole mechanism of modern publicity. The final judgment is not the result of direct acquaintance; it is the result of the news reports, the advertising, the oratory, the elusive rumors which are the modern substitute for direct acquaintance.

I am a big believer in PR.

I was going to be a writer, and that turned into journalist. And then that turned into a career in children's literature, which turned into early childhood education, which turned into psychology, which turned into premed, which turned into nursing school, which turned into communication, which turned into marketing and advertising.

Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.

The hired journalist, I thought, ought to realize that he is partly in the entertainment business and partly in the advertising business - advertising either goods, or a cause, or a government. He just has to make up his mind whom he wants to entertain, and what he wants to advertise.

As a profession advertising is young; as a force it is as old as the world.

In an easy cause anyone can be eloquent; the slightest strength is enough to break what is already shattered.

From his tongue flowed speech sweeter than honey.

Rhetoric is nothing but reason well dressed and argument put in order.

There is a truth and beauty in rhetoric; but it oftener serves ill turns than good ones.

Marketing, when done well, is about story telling.

I think we now know the limits also of intelligence and rhetoric.

Rhetoric paints with a broad brush.