Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
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.
Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.
I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.
Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
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.
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts.
Most people are alive in an earlier time, but you must be alive in our own time.
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.
For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.
In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.
Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.
The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with.
Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.
Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.
The medium is the message.
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
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.
We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.
Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.
Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.
Art is anything you can get away with.
If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.
The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
Affluence creates poverty.
Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.
I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.
The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.
Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.
Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.
