A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Today man's nerves surround us; they have gone outside as electrical environment. The human nervous system itself can be reprogrammed biologically as readily as any radio network can alter its fare.
Notes on Burroughs, 1964, p 517
Quote #1925
Year: 1964
Chapter: Electric, Electronic

Drawn to McLuhan #1

Loose sketch-style illustration of a woman wearing a VR headset, walking barefoot with arms outstretched in an empty room, reaching toward unseen virtual space.
"There is no inside or outside under electronic conditions."
Illustration of a giant smartphone with cartoon arms, legs, and a face, cradling three small human figures in its palm as they stare down at their own phones.
"The tools we shape, reshape us."
Illustrated scene of a young woman absorbed in her smartphone at a desk, with streams of garbled text flowing from the phone toward a looming, open-jawed animal skull beside her.
"How are you to argue with people who insist on sticking their heads in the invisible teeth of technology, calling the whole thing freedom?"
Illustrated historical battle scene of 18th-century soldiers in tricorn hats firing muskets and cannon amid smoke, with a military camp and hilltop fortress in the background.
"Invention is the mother of necessities, old and new."
Comic-style illustration of a startled one-eyed man peering from a wooden shed at a long line of identical men in sunglasses marching in formation with white canes.
"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hunted criminal."
Cartoon illustration of a Monopoly Man-style tycoon in top hat and tuxedo at a computer displaying redacted legal documents, in an office labeled "Monopoly City."
"The really great privilege of the elites of the future will be to erase the computer information about them and assume their private identities again."
Painterly illustration of two seagulls diving and swooping through looping ribbon-like trails against a blue-to-orange sunset sky, framed by decorative quotation marks.
"Conversation is, for me, something like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a game in which you play all sorts of nose-dives and air-tumbles."
Photorealistic miniature diorama inside a glass fishbowl showing a cutaway two-story house at night, with a family watching TV downstairs and a child asleep upstairs.
"As we transfer our whole being to the data bank, privacy will become a ghost or echo of its former self."
Illustrated cartoon of a teenage girl taking a selfie in her bedroom, its walls covered edge-to-edge with dozens of Polaroid-style photos of friends.
The nobody in real life is a person who becomes quite intractable [in demanding] "Who am I" and "How do I re-establish my image, myself in this world."
© The Estate of Marshall McLuhan