A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Found 64 quotes (21 duplicates hidden).
There are no more great men; there are only great committees.
Interview, The Spectator, November 8, 1975, p 26; also, “Marshall McLuhan is Alive and Well,” The Windsor Star, October 25, 1975
Year: 1975
Chapters:
McLuhanisms & Zingers | Dropout
For America, the electronic revolution from industrial products and consumerism to information and custom-made services, is a reversal of the entire way of life, with goals and directions suddenly yielding to roles and figures. America has found the paths of industrial uniformity and continuity no longer to its taste. Living in a new environment of instant electric information has shifted American attention from specific goals to the cognitive thrills of pattern recognition, a change that is manifested directly by the TV service of the instant replay. Is not the instant replay the externalizing of the cognitive principle itself? For the replay would seem to offer both cognition and re-cognition; the same pattern of reversal, in the transition from the industrial to the electric age, appears in the role of Sputnik (1957) in placing the planet inside a man-made environment.
"The Implications of Cultural Uniformity", in SUPERCULTURE: American Popular Culture and Europe, 1975, p 54
Year: 1975
Chapter:
America, North America
The bigger the technology, the bigger the upset, and the bigger the threat to one's image. The image can be private or corporate.
“Letter to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, July 30, (1975)”, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, (1987), p 513
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Anticipating Change
At the speed of light, everybody is a nobody. There is a further dimension at the speed of light—everybody is discarnate, a nervous system without a body. Anger and frustration resulting from such sudden inexplicable situations and loss may well account for the extremities of violence and obscenities manifest in the new floods of pornography.
“Letter to Clare Westcott, November 26, 1975”, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 515
Year: 1975
Chapters:
Anxieties Caused By Change | Nobody
↪ Also at #5100
The simultaneous has created the mass media and mass publics, for the mass has less to do with numbers than with speed. At electric speed it is the sender who is sent. This instantaneous factor may well have changed the mass audience from passive receivers to active participants and producers.
“At the Flip Point of Time” (1975), p 4
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Authority of Knowledge
Harvey Shands, psychologist, answers “no” to the question, “Is the mind in the brain?”
It’s in the whole body at once.
The widely distributed first-draft Laws of the Media, with Eric McLuhan (1975), p 267
Year: 1975
Chapters:
Body | Body Language
↪ Also at #645
Our time has discovered that there is a language of Forms and Gestures – a language which has its own grammar and syntax…. Darwin’s concern was with the non-verbal attitudes and postures, noting that: “…with mankind hardly any expression is more general than a widely open mouth under the sense of astonishment.”
Preface to You and Others: An Introduction to Interpersonal Communication (1975), opening paragraph
Year: 1975
Drawn to McLuhan #7
MCLUHAN: I learned my religion at the upper level before I found anything down there at all.
NINA SUTTON: Where?
MCLUHAN: Well, I was a reading Chesterton and Dawson, that's how I came in. I read my book.”
Nina Sutton Taped interview (1975), transcript: 4:30
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith
The instant replay, indeed, offers not just cognition but re-cognition, and leads the mind to the world of pattern recognition, to aftersight and foresight.
“The Implications of Cultural Uniformity”, in Superculture (1975), p 44
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Cognition and Recognition
For the replay would seem to offer both cognition and re-cognition, the same pattern of reversal in the transition from the industrial to the electric age, appears in the role of Sputnik (1957) in placing the planet inside a man-made environment.
“The Implications of Cultural Uniformity” (1975), typescript, p 14
Year: 1975
Chapters:
Cognition and Recognition | Replay
↪ Also at #6084
“Unless you understand a writer’s ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Quoted in “At the Flip Points—” (1975), p 1
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Coleridge
[Harrried engineer:] “You tell me what it is you say the computer can’t do and I’ll build you one that will do it.
Computer tetrad in the widely distributed first-draft Laws of the Media with Eric McLuhan, 1975, p 261
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Computer
Standing on a Paris street in 1914, watching a parade of military vehicles using a new camouflage, Picasso said, “Braque and I invented that.”
Cubism tetrad in the widely distributed first-draft Laws of the Media, 1975, with Eric McLuhan, p 256
Year: 1975
↪ Also at #2261
Toynbee (A Study of History) noted the tendency to do more and more with less and less: Etherealization. This is the epitome, the reversal whereby there is no hardware any more.
The Laws of Media, with Eric McLuhan, original draft (1975), p 251
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Discarnate
It is the [hidden service] environment that changes people, not the technology.
Living at the Speed of Light, 1975
Year: 1975
The most human thing about us is our technology. This may be literally true, since all human artifacts are extensions of our physical and psychic faculties.
Speech at Georgia State University, 1975, typescript, p 8
Year: 1975
Chapters:
Extension Theory | He’s Hopeful
↪ Also at #2669
The most human thing about us is our technology.
Talk at George State University, 1975; transcript, p 8
Year: 1975
A fake Monet by Picasso might be worth more than a mere Monet.
“Fake” tetrad, The Laws of Media, with Eric McLuhan, original draft of 1975, p 2
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Fake
Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground -- situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.
Letter to Clare Westcott, November 26 1975, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p 514
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Figure/Ground
As we seem to be acquiring the Eastern “software”, the Orient would seem to be taking over our Western hardware along with our Western alphabet. What has been formed is a completely new “ball park” of global dimensions with completely unfamiliar ground rules. In any event the printed and written word will have a salient function.
Speech delivered in Denver, May 4, (1975), transcript, p 3
Year: 1975
Chapters:
Hardware / Software | West and East
↪ Also at #7448
Familiarity breeds consensus.
Tetrad on Xerography, in the widely distributed first draft, Laws of the Media with Eric McLuhan, 1975, p 39
Year: 1975
Chapter:
He’s Hopeful
Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity
has been scrubbed or destroyed by sudden environmental change.
Letter to Claire Westcott, November 26, 1975, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 514
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Identity
Air conditioning in the southern U.S. has revolutionized its society. It’s turned every southern[er] into a Yankee in 15 years.
“The Undiluted Wisdom of Marshall McLuhan,” Montreal Gazette, May 16, 1975
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Innovation
Then I realized that the audience is, in all matters of art and expression, the formal cause, e.g., fallen man is the formal cause of the incarnation, and Plato's public is the formal cause of his philosophy. Formal cause is concerned with effects and with structural form, and not with value judgments.
Letter to John Culkin, 1975, in Letters (1987), p 510
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Values & Value Judgments
Today the electric revolution, the wired planet and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.
“Letter to Clare Westcott” (November 26, 1975), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 514
Year: 1975
Chapters:
Today’s Transition | Violence
↪ Also at #7292
If machines yield the secrets of their construction only as the result of breakdown, it is possible to discern the same principle at work in language and society.
“The Implications of Cultural Uniformity” (1975), pp 53-54
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Language
Language is ambiguous. The people who don’t like ambiguity invented mathematics.
Interview with Nancy Cole (1975), transcript, p 23w
Year: 1975
The natural impulse is to repeat, in this new form, the existing shows from older media. That is called "the law of implementation": we use the new to do the old, even if it doesn't need doing at all.
“At the Flip Point—” (1975), typescript, p 5
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Law of Implementation
The old reveals the new… Old movies advertise the world of difference in the TV medium, i.e., few [old movies] will “work” on TV.
Early tetrad for “Law of Implementation,” from first widely distributed early draft, Laws of the Media with Eric McLuhan (1975), p 281
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Law of Implementation
We use the new to do the old, even if it doesn't need doing at all. (The Law of Implementation)
“At the Flip Point—” (1975), typescript, p 5
Year: 1975
Chapters:
Law of Implementation | Rear View Mirror
↪ Also at #5995
[T]he four aspects of each of the media actually constitute the four features of all metaphors. In other words, all human technologies whatever are, in the fullest sense, linguistic outings, or utterings, of man.
Letter to Sister Frences Nims, June 11, 1975
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Laws of Media
I call them "laws" because they represent, as do scientific "laws," an ordering of thought and experience which has not yet been disproved; I call them "laws of the media" because the channels and impact of today's electronic communication systems provide the information foundations upon which we order, or structure, these experiential perceptions.
“McLuhan's Laws of the Media” in Technology and Culture, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Jan., 1975), p 75
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Laws of Media
Humour
Enhances dis-ease – grievance
Obsolesces the everyday ground
Retrieves decorum and equilibrium
Flips abrasion into catharsis
From attachment to a letter to Melvin Kranzberg Editor of The Journal of Culture and Technology, August 22, 1975, p 2
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Laws of Media
One of the strange hidden capacities of all innovations, all technologies, is that they always bring back things that have been pushed out of sight for a very long time. The motor car brought back knights in shining armor – that’s why it is a status symbol of considerable importance.
“Car’s Lost Its Role: McLuhan,” in The Toronto Star, March 26, 1975, p A11
Year: 1975
Chapter:
LOM 3 – Retrieve
In one era and out the other. You have to work fast. You flip in with a single gag in one ear and out the other.
Lecture given in the Gerstein Series Man and Media, March 1975, transcript, p 3
Year: 1975
Chapter:
LOM 3 – Retrieve
…the same shift in time-sense that produced Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Dread, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and Bohr’s theory of the atom.
An unnamed tetrad page of the original draft of Laws of Media, 1975, p 273
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Living Unity
My purpose is to invite criticism, directed not at me or at my rhetoric, but rather at the substance and contents of my thoughts
“McLuhan’s Laws of the Media,” Technology and Culture, Vol.16 , No.1, January (1975), p 74
Year: 1975
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
I still feel very much like the New Yorker cartoon lady who said, I don't know what I think until I say it.
A Report of The Fourth Annual Conference on The Teaching of The English Language Arts, (1975), p 7
Year: 1975
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
Develop the power and habit of listening. It is not a power that I have, and nobody ever told me how to go about getting it.
Letter to Eric McLuhan, September 24, (1975), (LAC)
Year: 1975
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
We had to put the TV down in the recreation room [in the basement] because when we had it up here we looked at it too often.
Nancy Cole interview, (1975-76), transcript, p 17
Year: 1975
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
The only “Control” exercised over the new forces would seem to consist of a fascinated withdrawal of perception from the new constitutive forces together with a panicky concern for the receding configurations. Such is the significance of the Goldwater mood and the rhetoric of Ayn Rand.
“Guaranteed Income in the Electric Age” (1975), p 68
Year: 1975
If you are moving at the speed of light, you are already there.
“The Undiluted Wisdom of Marshall McLuhan,” The Montreal Gazette, May 16, 1975, p 13
Year: 1975
Chapters:
McLuhanisms & Zingers | Speedups
↪ Also at #6537
“No one is so annoying as the person who goes right on talking when you’re trying to interrupt.”
From a list of McLuhan one-liners assembled by Gertrude Stein performer and interviewer Nancy Cole, 1975
Year: 1975
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
“Don’t pay attention to him. Don’t even ignore him.”
From a list of McLuhan one-liners assembled by Gertrude Stein performer and interviewer Nancy Cole, 1975
Year: 1975
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
How are we to bypass, or offset, the merely physical response to new technology and new environments created by new technologies? This problem has not been raised by anybody, except that we have to live with it every day.
Lecture, “Men and Media,” at York University, 1975, transcript, p 1,
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Media as Form
At electric speeds, every kind of human past is present, exactly in the manner in which T.S. Eliot discerned the prehistorical and contemporary simultaneity of the life of words [in his passage] “What I call the auditory imagination…”
“Implications of Cultural Uniformity,” 1975, p 56
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Speedups
The Rock sound bubble is not for listening to but for wearing and participating in.
“Acoustic Space” tetrad, The Laws of Media, with Eric McLuhan, original, widely distributed draft (1975), p 2
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Music
Moreover, I would like to suggest that changing sounds and rhythms in the environment in a highly technological age enter the common speech in undeveloped areas and emerge as popular music for the metropolis. Without this process of transformation, it might well be that we could not live with our technologies.
“Cultural Uniformity—” (1975), p 47
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Music
The international language is rock and roll. Rock and roll is English. They’ve tried it in German and Danish and it doesn’t work. The international language is being sung at this very hour in Hong Kong and Tokyo.
“The Undiluted Wisdom of Marshall McLuhan,” The Montreal Gazette, May 16, 1975, p 13
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Music
A new style [of news story] appears, one of immersion, of human interest: prose that does your feeling for you.
Telegraph Press Tetrad, Laws of the Media with Eric McLuhan, the widely circulated first draft of 1975, p 274
Year: 1975
Chapter:
News
[W]e must look at images from all sides and not only one.
“The Undiluted Wisdom of Marshall McLuhan,” in Montreal Gazette, May 16, 1975, p 13
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Perspective, Point of View
We live in a time when the coalescing of all people on earth into a single mass-public has diminished human private identity almost to the vanishing point. Anybody at a ball game, for example, is a nobody, and the entire planet has become our ball park.
Letter to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, July 2, 1975, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 512
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Privacy
The most important figure in the world is a nobody at a ball game. Electronically, however, all of us are attending the same ball game in the same ball park, namely, Spaceship Earth.
Letter to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, July 30, 1975, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 513
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Privacy
In the “Fourth World” of organized ignorance, media technology may bring a drastic reversal of historic patterns of problem solving.
“At the Flip Point of Time – The Point of More Return?” (1975), p 1
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Problem Solving
I think the instant replay is probably the most powerful experience that you will ever have in your lifetime.
Addressing students in the class of his brother, Maurice McLuhan, at the Sheridan School of Art & Design, Mississauga, Ontario, in January, 1975 (caught on video by Richard Kerr-Ed.).
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Replay
The simultaneous is automatically acoustic because you hear from all directions at once. You see from only a small area and vision is in fact continuum. The acoustic world is not continuous, there is no continuum in the ear world, but in the touch world every moment is different. You've heard the phrase “to the blind all things are sudden” every bit of space is different from every other day; there's no continuum for the blind, there's no continuum for the ear.
“Interview with Nina Sutton (1975)”, 00:08 ff
Year: 1975
Chapter:
Simultaneity
There are no more great men; there are only great committees.
In “Marshall McLuhan: He’s Alive and Well and Doing His Thing,” The Spectator, November 8, 1975, p 26
####
Politicians use glop. It just sits there. It creates a link between their pillows and your hair. That’s their way to feature a nest.
Culture Is Our Business, 1970, p 294
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Satirist
One of the conflicts of a progressive and rapidly changing world concerns the use of surrounding services which have been obsolesced by daily innovations and discoveries. A vast new industry has been born from this conflict, and its name is 'Camp', and its motto is: 'Throw something lovely away today. Help beautify junkyards'. Despite the grotesque aspect of 'Camp' as the incessant revival of that which has scarcely had a chance to register its appearance or existence, it has already been itself obsolesced by the popular technology of the video replay. The instant replay, available mainly to the audiences of sporting events, offers, as it were, the meaning minus the experience, reversing Mr. Eliot's observation that “we had the experience but missed the meaning”. The instant replay is the meaning in that it is less concerned with the input of experience than with the process of perception.
“The Implications of Cultural Uniformity” (1973), in Superculture: American Popular Culture and Europe, (1975), p 44
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Replay
However, the credit card can be hybridized with other technologies like that of the computer, which, in turn, gives to credit fantastic dimensions such as the change of form and function with the coming of telegraph services and the “wired planet.”
“Predicting 1983 and the Fourth World,” in Man and the Future of Organizations, Franklin Foundation Lecture Series, Volume 5, 1975, p 19
Year: 1983
Chapter:
Media Reprocess Media
Indeed, “date-line” became a basic new concept, both of information and form. The idea of “up-dating” ideas, perceptions, style of prose and dress, and management became mandatory. Instant news had to be written in the inverted pyramid form with the main story in the first sentence so that editors could cut the stories anywhere to fit them into their mosaic. The key point to notice is that no more connections among the news items were sought or missed. The resonant interval took the place of the logical connection, and people became obsessed with the need for “keeping in touch.”
“Predicting 1983 and the Fourth World,” in Man and the Future of Organizations, Franklin Foundation Lecture Series, Volume 5, 1975, p 17
Year: 1983
Chapters:
Innovation | Interval
↪ Also at #3082
Eliot explores this paradox of pain as the space of deadness and aloneness in much of his poetry. In the first eighteen lines of The Waste Land he sees it both inside and out: "memory and desire," the rain and the beer garden, the mosaic of the totally unconnected events of the sleigh ride and the whodunit as nightly "distraction from distraction," the desperate flight that is contrary to nature: "I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter." The poem presents a disconnected space, psychically and socially, of anguished Peter Pans.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 235
Year: 1968
Chapter:
Eliot, T.S.
In the same year (1900) that Max Planck announced quantum mechanics and the discontinuity of matter, Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams with its announcement of the discontinuity of the private and corporate self.
“Predicting 1983 and the Fourth World,” in Man and the Future of Organizations, Franklin Foundation Lecture Series, Volume 5, 1975, p 7 double check seems low the other quotes from this are higher page #
Year: 1983
Chapter:
Discontinuity
Most technologies have considerable power to displace and to obsolesce other ones. Money, for example, speeds and enhances transactions but obsolesces barter and such complicated forms of exchange. As it accelerates the production of wealth, money retrieves the characteristics of primitive “potlatch,” or conspicuous consumption. And finally, money, when pushed to its peak performance, flips into credit.
“Predicting 1983 and the Fourth World,” in Man and the Future of Organizations, Franklin Foundation Lecture Series, Volume 5, 1975, p 19
Year: 1983
Chapter:
Laws of Media