Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CCwas a Canadian professor, philosopher, and public intellectual. His work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries. He was educated at the University of Manitoba and Cambridge University and began his teaching career as a Professor of English at several universities in the U.S. and Canada, before moving to the University of Toronto where he would remain for the...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth21 July 1911
CityEdmonton, Canada
CountryCanada
The future of work consists of learning a living.
A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters.
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 electronic goal of a collective consciousness.
Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.
When people become too intense, too serious, they will have trouble in relating to any sort of social game or norm. Perhaps this is why jokes are so important. On one hand they tell us about where the problems and grievances are, and, at the same time, they provide the means of enduring these grievances by laughing at the problems.
People hope that if they scream loudly enough about "values" then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. Otherwise, why would they be screaming? Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity.
Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.
The greatest propaganda in the world is our mother tongue, that is what we learn as children, and which we learn unconsciously. That shapes our perceptions for life. That is propaganda at its most extreme form.
It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudosimplicities of brutal directness.
Art is anything you can get away with.
Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.