A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Found 8 quotes (3 duplicates hidden).
If the day comes when it is possible to program computers in figure-ground rather than in lineal patterns, then there will be a means of coping with environments holistically rather than by fragmentation and quantitative analysis. Currently, computer programming is done sequentially in the left hemisphere style, that is, by dealing with figures minus their grounds. That limitation is a legacy of our phonetic alphabet which 2500 years ago gave us the power of dealing analytically with figure minus ground.
“The Social Impact of the Computer” (1979), unpublished typescript, pp 8-9
Quote #1275
Year: 1979
Chapter: Computer
Many of the misconceptions about art, phony and phonetic, are rooted in the common illusion that the real is a faithful matching or repeat in one material of something that exists in another material. Picasso’s celebrated remark: “I always paint fakes”, or Renoir’s “I have painted about 1200 pictures and 2500 of them are in the U.S.A.” – remarks like these are mostly taken to be kidding. Even mass production has a basic component of sheer making, as well as faking.
“The Genuine Original IMIT/Routledgeation Fake,” DEWLine Newsletter, No 6, May-June, 1970, p 4
Quote #2267
Year: 1970
Chapter: Fake
Most people find it difficult to understand purely verbal concepts. They suspect the ear; they don’t trust it. In general we feel more secure when things are visible, when we can “see for ourselves.” We admonish children, for instance, to “believe only half of what they see, and nothing of what they hear.” All kinds of “shorthand systems of notation have been developed to help us see what we hear.
The Medium Is the Massage with Quentin Fiore (1967), p 117
Quote #2500
Year: 1967
Chapter: Goodbye Linearity
MIKE McMANUS: You say, too, that between today's child who has been raised electronically — and who must still live in a literate world, because we are still in a literate world — that there's a 2400-year gap between that boy or girl and his parents...
McLUHAN: And his parents, who grew up in a literate society. Well, the alphabet, the phonetic alphabet, the beginnings of western literacy, came in about 500 B.C. And since then, between then and now is approximately 2400 or 2500 years. And we are the first post-literate generation, as it were. We have by-passed the literate world of hardware and the lineal left hemisphere technology. We have by-passed it by moving once more, again, into the altogether world, the holistic world, of the right hemisphere people, who are the third-world people. So what is happening to our own children is we're watching them become third-world.
“Mike McManus TVO interview”, 1977, transcript 9:28
Quote #2580
Year: 1977
Chapters: Hardware / Software | Today’s Transition
↪ Also at #6875
The West readily accepts visual matching as a criterion of truth and science; and our ideas of “causation” have tended toward mere classification for 2500 years. To the Greek, for whom phusis or “nature” was figure he had hoicked out of the ground of existence, it seemed that in creating the classification of phusis he had done all the entelechizing [or examining the effects of human artifacts -ed] that was needed. Nature was his art form.
“Roles, Masks, and Performances” (1971), p 523
Quote #3793
Year: 1971
Chapter: Matching and Making
Print simply wiped out the main modes of oral education that had been devised in the Greco-Roman world and transmitted with the phonetic alphabet and the manuscript throughout the medieval period. And it ended that 2500-year pattern in a few decades.
“What Fundamental Changes Are Foreshadowed In The Prevailing Patterns Of Educational Organization And Methods Of Instruction By The Revolution In Electronics?”, paper presented to Discussion Group 16 at the Fourteenth National Conference on Higher Education, March 3, 1959, p 2
Quote #5734
Year: 1959
Chapter: Print
After 2500 years of alphabetic and typographic culture, it is not easy for us to adjust suddenly to the non-visual, inner space of the interval and to the ferment of the "interface".

To make the transition from the "outer trip" of the visually-oriented man to the "inner trip" of the audile-tactile world, is to shift from West to East.

"Backward" and non-literate cultures and individuals take readily to non-visual or electric technology, which is the world of the new quantum mechanics or of the resonating chemical bond.
The DEWLINE Newsletter, Vol 1, # 5 (NOVEMBER 1968)
Quote #6140
Year: 1968
Chapters: Retribalizing | Today’s Transition | West and East
↪ Also at #6886, #7451

Drawn to McLuhan #12

Whimsical vintage-style illustration of a man in a top hat perched on a crescent moon, fishing with a line that strings together a chorus line of dancers, a line of men, a factory assembly line, and a clothesline of laundry, all suspended above a globe of the Earth.
“We have all noticed how lineality has faded from the current scene. The chorus line, the stag line, the assembly line, all have gone the way of the clothes line.”
Illustration of two medieval soldiers in armor playing cards by candlelight atop a castle wall, while a distant army with ladders approaches across the countryside.
“The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.”
Dark, moody illustration of a giant smartphone with muscular humanoid arms and legs, its screen showing a glowing image of Earth crisscrossed with bright network connection lines.
"The next medium, whatever it is -- it may be the extension of consciousness -- will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form."
Four-panel comic strip showing an office worker at a computer gradually transforming, panel by panel, into a snarling green troll-like monster as his desk grows messier and the room darkens.
“The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.”
Photo-realistic image of a television news anchor at a studio desk shrugging with raised palms, beneath an on-screen headline reading "Real Video or Deepfake? Experts are Split."
“The difference between factitious and fictitious tends to dissolve.”
Split illustration joined by a handshake inside overlapping speech bubbles: an elderly bard playing a lyre beside a campfire on the left, and an armored ancient warrior shaking hands with a red rocket-booted superhero in front of a glowing television screen on the right.
“The culture heroes of preliteracy and postliteracy alike are robots.”
Comic-style illustration of a smug, cigar-smoking man in a pinstriped suit reclining in a leather armchair with his feet up on an ottoman, a globe and bookshelves behind him and a thought bubble with an exclamation point.
“One of the nicest things about being big is the luxury of thinking little.”
Cartoon illustration of an open-plan office in which the workers are drawn as giant bees hunched over keyboards at computer monitors, beneath a wall sign reading "App-Lied Intelligence."
“Like the bees in the plant world, men have always been the sex organs of the technological world.”
Illustration of a hand holding a smartphone that displays a mock nutrition-facts label titled "This Podcast's Nutritive Value," listing percentages such as Tribal Affirmation Score and Rage Incitement Factor, against a softly blurred living-room background.
“It is we ourselves who serve these environments.”
In the seventies [the generation gap] widened from 25 years to 2500 years; from literacy to postliteracy, as parents who had grown up in a literate world faced postliterate children. In the amnesia of the Eighties, as the parents also lose their literacy and their forbidding and formidable identity profile, the young will feel free to come home again.
“Living at the Speed of Light” (1979), typescript, p 15
Quote #6952
Year: 1979
Chapter: Today’s Transition
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