A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Found 5 quotes (8 duplicates hidden).
TV will become an art form just as movie has done since TV. But in order to have autonomy we must push the unconscious and environmental parameters right up into consciousness.
“Letter to Harry J. Skornia, October 3, 1964 in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 311
Quote #311
Year: 1964
Chapter: Anticipating Change
Perhaps the terrifying thing about the new media for most of us is their inevitable evocation of irrational response. The irrational has become the major dimension of experience in our world.
“Culture without Literacy”, in Explorations #1, December (1953), p 126 reprinted in Essential McLuhan, (1995), p 311, additional reprint in Media Research Technology, Art and Communication (1997), p 136, and McLuhan Unbound #6, (2017)
Quote #378
Year: 1953
Chapters: Anxieties Caused By Change | Divided by Media | From Tribal to Literate | Hardware / Software | Time | Today’s Transition | Warnings
↪ Also at #1609, #2348, #2548, #6823, #6840, #6890, #7412
That situation...always adds up to the need to discover means for translating the experience of one medium or one culture into another, of translating Confucius into Western terms and Kant into Eastern terms. Of seeing our old literary culture in the new plastic terms in order to enable it to become a constitutive part of the new culture created by the orchestral voices and gestures of new media. Of seeing that modern physics and painting and poetry speak a common language and of acquiring that language at once in order that our world may possess consciously the coherence that it really has in latency, and which for lack of our recognition has created not new orchestral harmonies but mere noise.
“Culture without Literacy”, in Explorations #1, December (1953), p 126 reprinted in Essential McLuhan, (1995), p 311, additional reprint in Media Research Technology, Art and Communication (1997), p 136, and McLuhan Unbound #6, (2017)
Quote #2599
Year: 1953
Chapters: Harmony | Living Unity
↪ Also at #3573
The irrational has become the major dimension of experience in our world.
“Culture without Literacy”, in Explorations #1, December (1953), p 126 reprinted in Essential McLuhan, (1995), p 311, additional reprint in Media Research Technology, Art and Communication (1997), p 136, and McLuhan Unbound #6, (2003)
Quote #4098
Year: 1953
Chapter: McLuhanisms & Zingers
Radio will serve as background-sound or as noise-level control, as when the ingenious teenager employs it as a means of privacy.
Understanding Media 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, pp 311-312
Quote #5951
Year: 1964
Chapter: Radio

Drawn to McLuhan #10

Black-and-white illustrated diptych with a bold headline banner, featuring pen-and-ink style portraits of two men (labeled George Meredith and James Joyce) each with a speech bubble of quoted text and a caption giving their names, nationalities, and life dates.
Photorealistic image of a grand library hall with a sign reading "Robo-losophers," lined with curtained booths labeled with names of philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, etc.), each containing a robotic/statue figure, while students converse in the aisle.
“The means that are destroying our tradition, our culture, and values, could be used to preserve and sustain them.”
Color illustration of an oversized, glowing television set surrounded by a dense field of empty speech bubbles and broken eggshells, with small crowds of people gathered below on either side.
“The advent of TV may carry us beyond speech altogether.”
Color cartoon illustration of a pilot and a woman eating at an airport café table, the woman saying in a speech bubble that the pilot “said to the pilot, ‘Knock knock’…”, with an airliner and ground crew visible through the window.
“Our time has discovered that there is a language of Forms and Gestures – a language which has its own grammar and syntax.”
Color cartoon illustration of scientists in lab coats dancing amid laboratory equipment, one exclaiming in a speech bubble about subatomic particles, in a particle physics lab set.
“Science and magic have married each other.”
Photorealistic image of an older man laughing heartily at the head of a seminar table, surrounded by smiling students, in front of a blackboard in a book-lined classroom.
“I want a career where I get to laugh a lot.”
Color illustration of an older, bespectacled man in a tweed jacket seated at a cluttered writing desk in a book-lined study, scratching his head while writing, with a copy of "Understanding Media" stacked nearby.
“I don’t pretend to understand my stuff. After all, my writing is very difficult.”
Color illustration of dejected, unemployed-looking people sitting on a city sidewalk holding cardboard signs ("MBA Was Useless," "College Degree $0 Return"), while a line of business-suited robots carrying briefcases walks past in the background.
“How much more Know-How is needed to make human life obsolete?”
Color illustration of a bespectacled man in a suit with three overlapping, motion-blurred heads (as if spinning), pointing toward a spinning desk globe encircled by ribbons labeled "Global Village" and "Medium Is the Message."
“Globes make my head spin. By the time I’ve located the place, they’ve changed the boundaries.”
Photo composite of two "hear no evil, see no evil" style classical marble busts (Plato covering his ears, Aristotle covering his eyes) beside a sepia-toned portrait photograph of an older man in a suit resting his chin on his hand, with a speech bubble of quoted text above them and name captions below.
“Why has no one in history — not Plato, certainly not Aristotle, no philosopher, ever regarded our technologies grammatically, asking how they inflect on us?”
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