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 occasion. Marshall McLuhan
An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him. Marshall McLuhan
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 infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression. Marshall McLuhan
Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it. Marshall McLuhan
As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.' Marshall McLuhan
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 direction of our own collective purposes. Marshall McLuhan
