Marshall McLuhan Quotes

In politics, a picture is worth a thousand words.

[Ronald Reagan] turned the White House into a soft focus TV studio.

Modern politics today requires a mastery of television. I've never really warmed up to television and, in fairness to television, it's never warmed up to me.

I think celebrity endorsements hurt politicians.

Pictures can be devastating. Who allowed John Kerry to get himself photographed windsurfing in a flowered swimsuit? Anyone in the real world in that operation?

I'm really interested in how we view the public figure, what makes a public figure, what makes a celebrity, and how images make politicians, so I take an interest in politics, but it's really an interest in the image.

I don't think we have the right haircut or tattoos for politics.

Television changed politics forever. If you’re not any good at it, forget it.

Our national politics has become a competition for images or between images, rather than between ideals.

Our presidents have been getting to be synthetic monsters, the work of a hundred ghost- writers and press agents so that it is getting harder and harder to discover the line between the man and the institution.

Politics is television and whoever masters it is likely to win.

They sell us the President the same way they sell us our clothes and cars.

The response is to the image, not to the man, since 99 percent of the voters have no contact with the man.

Did I say that the President's entire job is image management? Of course not.

Obama's people will all often complain about how trivial and silly the media is, but there's no president who's probably benefited from this sort of trivialness or superficial nature as President Obama.

In the age of television, image becomes more important than substance.

Images in the 20th century had a unique power where image became divorced from reality, and often more important than reality... Buildings were judged - at least by members of our own profession - more by the way they looked in magazines than by the satisfaction people felt when using them.

Appearances are not truth. But every politician knows that his or her image, as well as his or her actions, can make the difference between failure and success.

We shouldn't require our politicians to be movie stars. Then again, we're all influenced by charisma. It's hard not to be. We all collectively fall for it.

We all know that looks matter, and modern politicians have always assumed that their battles are decided on both substance and image.

Today, political events are nullified unless they're on TV.

Politics is there the way men and women are there, the way the Atlantic Ocean is there. Sometimes I've written about politics specifically, I mean about politics as it's understood on television and in newspapers.

There is something discordant about a team of speechwriters and political operatives hammering away to create an image of the 'real, inner' candidate. And, to be blunt, there is no necessary connection between a moving life experience and the skills necessary for leadership.

No, no, no. Dick Cheney forbade me to waste time on his image. I would have liked to have done more.

Eisenhower was willing to experiment with television to promote his candidacy, his Democratic opponent Adlai Stevenson was less inclined to do so. Fearful that the election might become a simple decision between “Ivory soap vs. Palmolive,” Stevenson shunned short, televised commercials and opted instead to talk sense to the American people with more substantive speeches.