It's hard to find anything by McLuhan that isn't a great quote!

I vaguely remember some interview where he expressed a bit of dismay at being received as a wild and out there psychedelic preacher when he was really doing his best to express the trajectory of media and the world as he saw it.

Of course he must have delighted in the way he used language so prophetically and aphoristically, and he did make huge claims every other sentence. He seemed to talk like that naturally; if you listen to live interviews, he's the same way.

Tons of fact recall like Chomsky, spectacular persona like Zizek, and futuristic like Kurzweil—it's weird he isn't more popular here. Maybe it's because if you like him people think you're a hippie.

McLuhan was a remarkable combination of conservative Catholic and pop culture proto-troll. His relative obscurity now is probably a reaction against his original celebrity. Many academics were shocked and embittered by that, and there seems little incentive to treat him seriously yet, so the attempts that I've seen to rehabilitate him as a thinker are so far still marginal.