A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Found 11 quotes (8 duplicates hidden).
Today, for example, the entire Watergate affair is intimately linked with the world of the microphone and the recording, creating a great new acoustic dimension in politics which is in direct conflict with the press, the Constitution, and the printed word.
“Liturgy and the Microphone”, (1974), p 16
Quote #242
Year: 1974
Chapter: America, North America
A work of art has no existence or function apart from its effects on human observers. And art, like games or popular arts, and like media of communication, has the power to impose its own assumptions by setting the human community into new relationships and postures.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 242
Quote #1874
Year: 1964
Chapter: Effect
The principle of new technologies as an archetypal environment that moulds new art forms out of the antecedent technologies is a principle that applies to all the arts and sciences, to architecture, as much as to music, or mathematics.
“The New Media and the Arts” (1964), p 242
Quote #2031
Year: 1964
Chapters: Art, Artists | Environment | Living Unity | Media Reprocess Media
↪ Also at #454, #3589, #4599
I have ordered Self-Condemned from Peter Russell and look forward to it very much. Toronto has been alerted and has begun to tremble.
Letter to Wyndham Lewis, February 7, 1954, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 242
Quote #3472
Year: 1954
Chapter: Lewis, Wyndham
It can be enunciated as a principle that all new media or technologies, whatever, create new environments, psychic and social, that assume as their natural content the earlier technologies. Moreover, the content of these new environments undergoes a progressive reshaping so that what had appeared earlier as dishevelled and degraded becomes conventionalized into an artistic genre. TV, as the latest archetypal environment or technology, is very much in this dishevelled phase.
“The New Media and the Arts” (1964), p 242
Quote #4635
Year: 1964
Chapter: Media Reprocess Media
It is the [hidden] environment that changes people, not the technology.
“Living at the speed of light” (1974), reprinted in Understanding Me, p 242
Quote #5054
Year: 1974
Chapters: Dropout | Environment | Extension Theory | Living Unity | McLuhanisms & Zingers | News
↪ Also at #2071, #2216, #4214
Radio and TV enormously increased the consciousness of the auditory space, and spurred an involvement that extended to the revival of ancient religions among several of the Indian nations of this continent.
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 242
Quote #6135
Year: 1970
Chapter: Retribalizing

Drawn to McLuhan #8

Illustration of a broken, spring-exposed psychiatrist's couch with stuffing spilling out, beneath a framed diploma reading "Dr. Aris T. Otle, M.D., Psychiatry & Neurology."
“The psychiatrist’s couches of the world are sagging with people who have lost their sense of identity.”
Illustration of four large presidential-style stone monument faces, resembling Mount Rushmore, cracking apart on a frozen, fractured lake surface as ice skaters glide across it.
“The old mythology is disintegrating: to survive is to remythologize.”
Illustration of a man in a hoodie reading "YAY ME!" waving cash in the air while suspended as a marionette controlled by a giant money-bag puppeteer, surrounded by a cheering crowd.
“The man of great wealth in the new information world is a puppet employee of his own wealth.”
Illustration of a professor at a classroom lectern addressing students, chalkboards covered in equations behind him, with a speech bubble containing the quote text.
“That question is so stupid that it deserves an answer.”
Four-panel illustrated sequence of a man in an armchair tossing paired coin-like tokens labeled "Learning/Ignorance," "White/Black," "Public/Privacy," and "Affluence/Poverty" across a study.
“Learning creates ignorance. / White creates black. / The public creates privacy. / Affluence creates poverty.”
Illustration of a bespectacled man in a cluttered study scratching his head in confusion while writing at a desk piled with books, one titled "Understanding Media," beneath a sign reading "The Sense-Presses."
“I don’t pretend to understand my stuff. After all, my writing is very difficult.”
Illustration of a man in a tweed jacket and bow tie operating a humanoid robot backstage near a curtained stage with a microphone stand, evoking a ventriloquist and his dummy.
“But a conscious computer would still be one that was an extension of our consciousness, as a telescope is an extension of our eyes, or as a ventriloquist's dummy is an extension of the ventriloquist.”
Illustrated scene of a man in a suit reading papers while seated in an armchair, suspended by a mechanical tonearm on the surface of an oversized vinyl record labeled "Side A."
“Are you in the groove? That is, are you moving in ever-diminishing circles?”
Illustration of a man meditating cross-legged on a rock amid a devastated, cracked cityscape with toppled buildings and a leaning clock tower; a thought bubble above him shows an intact walled castle.
“And no matter how many walls have fallen, the citadel of individual consciousness has not fallen nor is it likely to fall.”
The Baroque painters did exactly as did Montaigne in shifting attention to the peripheries of vision.
The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962, p 242
Quote #6295
Year: 1962
Chapter: Senses
The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces.
“The New Media and the Arts” (1964), p 242
Quote #6311
Year: 1964
Chapters: Senses | Television
↪ Also at #6764
Any game, like any medium of information, is an extension of the individual or the group. Its effect on the group or individual is a reconfiguring of the parts of the group or individual that are not so extended.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 242
Quote #6574
Year: 1964
Chapters: Language | Sports and Games
↪ Also at #3275
PLAYBOY: Isn't the thrust of your argument, then, that the introduction of the phonetic alphabet was not progress, as has generally been assumed, but a psychic and social disaster?
McLUHAN: It was both. I try to avoid value judgments in these areas, but there is much evidence to suggest that man may have paid too dear a price for his new environment of specialist technology and values. Schizophrenia and alienation may be the inevitable consequences of phonetic literacy.
Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media”. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 59-60, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995),p 242
Quote #7167
Year: 1969
Chapter: Typewriter
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