A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Found 21 quotes (4 duplicates hidden).
The world of modern advertising is a magical environment constructed to maintain the economy, not to increase human awareness.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 243
Year: 1968
Chapter:
Advertising
America is 100% 18th century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy—the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the U.S.A.
“Letter to Ezra Pound, December 21, (1948)”, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 224
Year: 1948
Chapter:
America, North America
Artists in general and in all ages are engaged in grappling directly with the ever new problems of experience resulting from technological change
Quoted in F. Shoemaker & L. Forsdale (Eds Grammars for the Newer Media, In Communication in General Education: College Composition and Communication, (1960), p 22. Portions later reprinted as “The New Media and the New Education”, in The Basilian Teacher, December (1961), p 93-100
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Art, Artists
The classroom is now in a vital struggle for survival with the immensely persuasive "outside" world created by new informational media. Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery —to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms.
The Medium is the Massage (1967), p 100
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Education
Canada is still almost entirely a 19th century country. It has very little relation to the 20th century. Its educational system is anachronistic: students are still being processed through the old fragmented specialist chopper and they might as well be on a carousel or a merry-go-round in some entertainment park. Our youngsters at school are reacting to this, and dropping out of school is one response. The youngsters coming out of a highly integral electronic environment go to school and are confronted by a fragmented, specialist environment of subjects and hours and instructions which baffle them. They know that this form of fragmentation does not correspond in any way to the world they’re living in. They’ve already been deeply imbued with this new electronic world from the cradle, from the time they begin to look at TV. When the school fails to make sense of their environment, they drop out, either physically or psychologically. The psychic dropout far outnumbers the physical dropout which also is on the increase. The psychic dropout is probably about 100%.
“Electronics & the psychic drop-out”, in This Magazine is about Schools, April, 1966, p 40
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Education
In Gestalt, reality presents itself to the mind as a figure detaching itself from a ground. We notice the figure first and most often it dominates our whole field of consciousness.
Religion and Youth (Conversation with Pierre Babin, 1977) in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 100
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Figure/Ground
…it’s all being outmoded. Skyscrapers, cars, factories, are much in the position of horse and buggy. There are more horses and good horses in the world right now than there were 100 years ago, but they’re all elitist. They belong to important people and so on. But the horse and buggy-left hemisphere people will always hang around as a kind of elite.
J Kirsch interview (1976), typescript, p 7
Year: 1976
Chapter:
Hemispheres of the Brain
Drawn to McLuhan #9
[Acoustic space] is a space which phases us out of the world of logical continuity and connected stability into the space-time world of the new physics in which the mechanical bond is the resonant interval of touch where there are no connections, but only interfaces.
“The End of the Work Ethic” (1973), in Media Research (1997), p 100
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Interval
It is a commonplace of the poetic and critical discussion of the last 100 years to note that human languages are the greatest of all works of art beside which the works of Homer, Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare are minor variations.
Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters” The McAuley Lectures: Christian Humanism in Letters, Saint Joseph College, West Hartford Connecticut, (1954), p 50, reprinted in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 154.
Year: 1954
Chapter:
Language
↪ Also at #3266
I have not read much more than 100 pages [of the Bible] yet realize that they alone contain the laws that govern man and this universe. I am sure God meant us to understand these + to exercise them. Dad put me on a trail that I shall have shortly have traversed past his stopping point. It is an interpretation of some of Christ’s sayings according to a mixture of Psychology + Metaphysics. When I consider of a world in which every person was acquainted with the great laws that surround us, it is quite possible to conceive that death sickness and sin would be things as absurd as the practices of ancient physicians.
Diary of 1930, entry made Sunday June 15 [he was 18]
Year: 1930
Chapter:
Laws of Media
When I have had a bit more philosophy and psychology, which I shall augment with scripture study, I am going to work out some of the great “laws” that govern the affairs of men, temporal and spiritual. Dozens of these laws are being used to-day unconsciously, by successful and happy people. I believe it will be the biggest step ever taken in philosophy if a 100 or so of these laws were to be carefully worked out and studied. It was Dad’s idea but he has not bothered to carry it far enough. Again he is prone to be too communicative. These things demand elaboration before communication.
Diary of 1930, entry he made Sunday October 26 [he was 19]
Year: 1930
Chapter:
Laws of Media
The photograph enhances pictorial realism and obsolesces portrait painting. The vacuum cleaner obsolesces the broom and the beater, the dryer pushes aside the clothes-line, and the washer the washboard and tub; the refrigerator replaces the icebox and the root cellar. Some forms are so evanescent they have their own built-in obsolescence.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), pp 99-100
Year: 1988
Chapter:
LOM 2 - Obsolesce
Obsolescence is not the end of anything, it's the beginning of aesthetics, the cradle of Taste, of eloquence and of slang.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 100
Year: 1988
Chapter:
LOM 2 - Obsolesce
Those who "play it by ear" are instantly aware of the effects of change. The same electric technology that has retrieved ESP and the occult for many levels and areas of American life has turned the kids away from "moreness," from glossy consuming to homespun and "camp" and "found" art.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 100
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Occult
When you put a new medium into play in a given population, all their sensory life shifts
a bit, sometimes shifts a lot. This changes their outlook, their attitudes, changes their feelings about studies, about school, about politics.
“Predicting Communication via the Internet (1966), in Understanding Me (2003), p 100
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Politics and Government
Our politics require much more hotting up than the TV medium will give them. TV is ideal when you get two experts like ourselves discussing TV.
“Predicting Communication via the Internet”, in Understanding Me (2003), p 100
Year: 2003
Chapter:
Politics and Government
The private sponge and the collective sponge, both reaching out for their rations of sensation, achieved a horrible distinctness and clarity that matched the raw power of the predatory army machine.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, pp 100-101
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Privacy
But the absurdity of speaking of space as a neutral container will never trouble a culture which has separated its visual awareness from the other senses. Yet, says [Sir Edmund] Whittaker (p. 100 [of Space and Spirit]) “in Einstein’s conception, space is no longer the stage on which the drama of physics is performed: it is itself one of the performers; for gravitation, which is a physical property, is entirely controlled by curvature, which is a geometrical property of space.”
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 253; Sir Edmund Whittaker, Space and Spirit: Theories of the Universe and the Arguments for the Existence of God (1946)
Year: 1962
Chapter:
Space
(After expressing gratitude for Wain’s book of poems, A Word Carved on a Sill, 1956)
In fact, I wish you could get out an L.P. disc of those poems. The sooner professors of literature become disc-jockeys the better!
Letter of an unknown precise date to John Wain, in 1956, quoted in “The Incidental Thoughts of MM,” in Dear Shadows (1986), p 100
Year: 1956
Chapter:
Teaching
But the TV image is the first technology by which man has outered his haptic, or tactile, powers. Its effects, therefore, on the balance or ratio among our senses. Since at all times consciousness involves a ratio among the senses, any alteration of intensity in any of our senses causes an immediate "closure" or completion of pattern. Such new "closure" or completion is, in fact, a new posture of mind charged with new preferences and desires, as well as with new patterns of perception.
Whodunits as process (not narrative) still hold up on TV.
Culture Is Our Business (1970), p 100
Year: 1970
Chapters:
Balance | Television
There is no sense in putting an igloo in a heated space. There’s no use showing off snowshoes behind glass. Right out there you have Alice in Wonderland, the original Dodgson manuscript of it. Then we have the expurgated edition, illustrated by Tenniel, in which all the grammar was cleaned up. … But interestingly, the Lewis Carroll drawing of Alice – this is Alice when she is ten feet tall – starts to distort at the feet. She has little girl’s feet, and the attenuation starts and moves right up through the whole figure…. When you get the Tenniel edition set in type, you get a drawing which, if you cover it from the shoulders down, is a perfectly formed little girl. The only attenuation that Tenniel could manage to achieve, was to lengthen the neck and then, rather frighteningly, he raised the collar to hide it. So there was no real sense of the spaces of Lewis Carroll. And of course, the type bears no relationship to the illustrations…. What I’m simply saying is that Tenniel is a highly literate illustrator who was totally incapable of dealing with the mathematical and non-visual spaces of Lewis Carroll.
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October 9-10, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, pp 99-100
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Linear and Nonlinear | Museum
↪ Also at #4833