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

Marshall McLuhan

Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.

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.

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.

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

Marshall McLuhan

Age

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

Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.

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

Marshall McLuhan

Art

Advertising

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.

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

Marshall McLuhan

Luxury

Understanding

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

Marshall McLuhan

Thought

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.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

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.

Affluence creates poverty.

Marshall McLuhan

Poverty