A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

My object is to learn the grammar and general language of 20 major fields in order to help on an orchestra among the arts. cf. S. Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command [1948] as sample of how I should like to set up a school of literary studies. Basic modes of cognition on this continent not linguistic but technological. Artistic experience comes to the young only via that channel. Must work with that at first. Present procedure is to slap an alien culture over the actual one. The real one is killed and the alien one is worn as a party mask. You and Eisenstein have shown me how to make use of Chinese ideogram to elicit the natural modes of American sensibility. But I've just begun. Feeling my way.
Letter to Ezra Pound, January 5, 1951, in Letters (1987), p 218
Year: 1951
↪ Also at #3853
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan