A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Found 12 quotes (4 duplicates hidden).
[The Arts] presented a medium for unifying many fields.
Words he spoke in 1949; from the minutes of the Fifth “Values Symposium "meeting convened by W.T. Easterbrook, University of Toronto, 1949, recorded by Mary Quayle Innis in her minutes of the Fifth and Eighth meetings, U of Toronto Archives, quoted by Thomas W. Cooper in his dissertation, Pioneers in Communication: The Lives and Thought of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, University of Toronto, 1979, p 176
Quote #3578
Year: 1949
Chapter: Living Unity
Existence is opaque to the rationalist. He seeks essences, definitions, formulas. He lives in the concept and the conceptualizable. Ideally, in a world of essences, actually, in a state of complete inanition. Cut off from the nutriment of existence, his very postulates discourage him from that loving and disciplined contemplation of existence, of particulars.
“T.S. Eliot’s Historical Decorum” (1949), Renascence, (Fall) Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 9-15. Rpt., Renascence, (25th Anniversary Issue, Summer 1973, p 147
Quote #2624
Year: 1949
Chapter: Hemispheres of the Brain
The machine is power. And practical politics mean quite simply that the machine must assume increasingly its most powerful form. The shape and rational form of man is now irrelevant. The will of all society has persisted in this direction for more than a century. Enthusiastic abdication on behalf of the machine. Eager embrace of man when deloused of his humanity by technics. That is the impatient wish, the wider hope embedded in the Luce publications [Time, Life, and Fortune] examined here.
“The Psychopathology of ‘Time’ and “Life’ (1949), reprinted in The Scene Before You (1955), p 159
Quote #2644
Year: 1949
Chapters: He’s Doubtful | Human Scale | Technology | Tools We Shape, Reshape Us
↪ Also at #2776, #6683, #6979
Literature is the recognized storehouse of human values. The [literary] critic has the key to that storehouse.
“Delinquent Adults Behind the Super Comics” unpublished, undated typescript, circa (1949), p 1
Quote #3544
Year: 1949
Chapters: Literary Criticism | McLuhan on McLuhan
↪ Also at #3859
It has become a truism that literary analysis is the keenest instrument we have for the exploration of human values.
Preface, Reason and Tradition, an unfinished manuscript, c. 1949-1950 [LAC)
Quote #3545
Year: 1949
Chapter: Literary Criticism
…the art of the movie is not to be judged by the invention and arrangement of images but by the effect which those images have on the mind or guts of a spectator.
“The Psychopathology of Time & “Life,” (1949) in The Scene Before You (1955), p 149
Quote #4789
Year: 1949
Chapter: Movies
Violence in America is big business.
“Money in Comics,” unpublished typescript, c. 1949
Quote #5023
Year: 1949
Chapter: News

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."
What Eliot has done for the revaluation of English letters from this point of view [exploring causes and effects of the split between thought and feeling], [Sigfried] Giedion has done for the successes and failures of the past four centuries in the organization of interior and exterior space.
Review of Mechanization Takes Command (1949), p 600
Quote #6444
Year: 1949
Chapter: Space
… to “throw together’ [symbolizing] is a work that cannot be undertaken nor understood by the unequivolizing, single plane, rationalist mind.
“Mr. Eliot’s Historical Decorum”, 1949 [locate publication details and page]
Quote #6578
Year: 1949
Chapter: Sports and Games
That irrational wish [of mechanization engendering more mechanization] continues to manifest itself in an interest in production for its own sake. Human goals were, initially, incidental to this wish. They are now irrelevant to it.
“Encyclopedic Unities,” review of L. Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion and Sigfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command, Hudson Review, Vol. 1, No. 4, Winter, 1949, p 599
Quote #6995
Year: 1949
Chapter: Tools We Shape, Reshape Us
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 teach-in represents an attempt to shift education from instruction to discovery, from brainwashing students to brainwashing instructors. It is a big, dramatic reversal.
“McLuhanisms on Education,” in “Where It’s At / Where It’s Going” Campus Call (Fordham University), Vol. X, No. 5, pp. 3-4, January 19,1970, p 4
Quote #1949
Year: 1970
Chapter: Electric, Electronic
So the process of renewal can't come from above. It can only take the form of reawakened critical faculties. The untrancing of millions of individuals by millions of individual acts of the will. Psychological decentralization. A merely provisional image of how it might (not how it should) occur could be formed by supposing every mechanical agency of communication in the world to be suspended for six months. No press. No radio. No movies. Just people finding out who lived near them. Forming small communities within big cities. It would be agony. All psychological drugs cut off. No capsulated thoughts or melodies. To say that anything like this could never happen, or that it should never be allowed to happen is a remark worthy of those mesmerized practical men who are efficiently arranging for the obsequies of our world's mind and body alike. If something like this doesn't happen it is quite plain what will happen.
"Psychopathology of 'Time' and 'Life’", in SCENE BEFORE YOU: A New Approach to American Culture, New York: Rinehart, 1955. (First published in Neurotica 5, 1949).
Quote #7328
Year: 1955
Chapters: Wake Them Up! | Drugs
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