A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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(All “elementary particles” are packaged ignorance.) Aristotle’s “pairs” where one process is always the privation of another, were also familiar to the Chinese sage Wang Gu (A.D. 90-165): “Poverty arises from wealth, weakness derives from power / Order engenders disorder, and security insecurity.” That is, affluence breeds poverty… just as matter creates space (not void). Such complementarity of figure-ground appears as a causal relation in all “prepackaged” processes. Complementarity is the process whereby effects become causes.
“Symposium” (1973), p 111
Quote #6265
Year: 1973
Chapters: Complementarities | Science
↪ Also at #1224

Drawn to McLuhan #11

Illustrated scene of four young people wearing VR headsets, striking playful dance poses in a cluttered tech office decorated with video game posters and whiteboards, with glowing sword and game icons floating around them.
"The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine readily masters the grim and the dumb."
Illustrated scene of two caricatured Cold War figures, Uncle Sam and a Soviet military officer, juggling televisions, computer monitors, and mobile devices while standing on opposite sides of a cracked, splitting cliff under a stormy sky.
"The bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images."
Illustrated classroom scene of a stern, glasses-wearing teacher handing back graded papers marked with red F's to worried students, with a speech bubble containing bold text above him.
Photorealistic portrait of a grey-haired man in a tweed suit standing in a wood-paneled library, resting his hand on an illuminated antique globe, looking toward the camera.
(McLuhan's thought in some else's nutshell phrasing) "All that you touch you change. / All that you change changes you. / The only lasting truth is change." Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower
Black-and-white ink illustration of World War II-era bomber crew loading bombs stamped with social-media-style icons (speech bubbles, "out," "T") into a plane's open bomb bay, with the bombs falling and exploding over a city below.
"Information, as such, is the new sinews of war."
Illustrated scene of a grey-haired man (McLuhan) speaking at a lectern on a stage before a seated audience, with a large speech bubble shaped like a rifle firing a starburst explosion.
"In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon."
Split illustration: left panel shows an aerial view of a geometric city intersection with rows of pedestrians walking in straight lines; right panel shows a man in a suit running diagonally across a field of black and grey polka dots.
"I do not move along lines. I use points like the dots in a wire-photo."
Wide illustrated panoramic timeline of human transportation history, divided into vertical panels showing a bare foot, a millstone, an ox cart, a rowed galley ship, a covered wagon, a horse-drawn carriage, an early automobile, a propeller airplane, and a rocket launching into space.
"All invention is a form of bodily fission, with the ensuing chain reactions in the body and in the environment."
Retro illustrated comic-style scene of a bespectacled, grey-haired professor (McLuhan) lecturing in a classroom before two students, a looping electrical cord running from his open mouth to a large blank speech bubble plugged into a wall outlet.
"A McLuhanism … consists perhaps simply in tying an unexpected circuit … it's a form of circuitry."
Dark illustration of a row of silhouetted people looking down at glowing smartphones, with colorful swirling light trails connecting their phones upward to an image of planet Earth above them.
"When information moves at electric speeds the world of trends and rumors becomes the real world."
© The Estate of Marshall McLuhan