A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Viewing chapter After Language (23 quotes)
“Nonverbal communication is an elaborate secret code that is written nowhere, known by none, and understood by all.”
Edward Sapir, Anthropologist (1884-1939)
Quote #185
Year: 1939
Chapter: After Language
In the computer age, speech yields to macrocosmic gesticulation or the direct interface of total cultures. The silent movies began this move.
Counterblast (1969), p 13
Quote #186
Year: 1969
Chapter: Body Language
An immediate simulation of consciousness would by-pass speech in a kind of massive extrasensory perception, just as global thermostats could by-pass those extensions of skin and body that we call houses. Such an extension of the process of consciousness by electric simulation may easily occur in the 1960s.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge p 130
Quote #187
Year: 1964
Chapters: Language | Propaganda | Speech
[Someday we may see] …a kind of computerized ESP with consciousness as the corporate content of the environment – and eventually, maybe even a small portable computer, about the size of a hearing aid, that would process our private experience the way dreams do now.
From a lecture at Spencer Memorial Church in NYC in spring of 1965, reported in “The Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, May 15, 1965
Quote #188
Year: 1965
Chapters: Computer | Corporate Consciousness | Extending Consciousness | From Tribal to Literate | Occult | Predictions | Present [The]
While bemoaning the decline of literacy and the obsolescence of the book, the literati have typically ignored the imminence of the decline in speech itself. The individual word, as a store of information and feeling, is already yielding to macroscopic gesticulation.
War and Peace in the Global Village, 1968, p. 90-91.
Quote #189
Year: 1968
Statement without syntax or verbalization was really statement by gesture, by mime, and by g_e_s_t_a_l_t_. This new dimension opened for human inspection by poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud l_e_ _p_a_y_s_a_g_e_ _i_n_t_ér_i_e_u_r_, or the countries of the mind.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 201
Quote #190
Year: 1964
Chapters: Body Language | Photography
Electric technology does not need words any more than the digital computer needs numbers
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 80
Quote #191
Year: 1964
Chapters: Computer | Electric, Electronic
…if you have difficulty envisioning something as trivial as the imminent end of elections, you’ll be totally unprepared to cope with the prospect of the forthcoming demise of spoken language and its replacement by a global consciousness
PLAYBOY: Are you talking about global telepathy?
McLUHAN: Precisely. Already, computers offer the potential of instantaneous translation of any code or language into any other code or language. If a data feedback is possible through the computer, why not a feed forward of thought whereby a world consciousness links into a world computer? Via the computer, we could logically proceed from translating languages to bypassing them entirely in favor of an integral cosmic unconsciousness somewhat similar to the collective unconscious envisioned by Bergson.
Playboy Interview (1969), in The Essential McLuhan (1995), p 262
Quote #192
Year: 1969
Chapter: Predictions

Drawn to McLuhan #9

Vintage-style cartoon illustration of a wild-eyed man in a red suit and hat running off the edge of a cliff while reading an open book and swinging a butterfly net at a monarch butterfly just out of reach.
“The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.”
Photograph of a museum gallery where two visitors view a large grid of nine framed screens/photographs depicting a lush green forest, arranged edge-to-edge on a white wall.
“The new media are not bridges between man and nature, they are nature.”
Illustrated cartoon of a man in a suit trapped and falling through the neck of a giant hourglass, being funneled through a glowing smartphone into a stream of binary code below, set against an aged newspaper-page background.
“The more that is recorded about each one of us in the data banks, the less we exist.”
Illustrated drawing of an anxious-looking woman biting a pencil while standing in a voting booth with curtains, other voters visible blurred in the background.
“The ballot box, for example, is the product of literate Western culture—a hot box in a cool world—and thus obsolescent. The tribal will is consensually expressed through the simultaneous interplay of all members of a community that is deeply interrelated and involved, and would thus consider the casting of a ‘private’ ballot in a shrouded polling booth a ludicrous anachronism.”
Weathered street-art photograph of three life-size paper cutout figures pasted on a green wooden wall, each wearing everyday clothing but with a motor-scooter front end/headlight in place of a head.
“People really do think of themselves as specialized machines nowadays. ‘That’s just my speed’ is a most revealing remark.”
Illustrated cartoon of a man sitting hunched before a panel of stern, seated academics at a curved tribunal table in a book-lined hall, with one panelist pointing accusingly as a large speech-bubble text looms overhead.
[In a 1976 letter to a student friend] “In passing, you mention that the moment of judgment would be a judgment by one's peers. This is indeed a terrifying thought.”
Illustrated cartoon of an army of angry, weapon-wielding question-mark characters storming a castle with ladders and axes, while a line of academics in caps and gowns holding open books stands defending the wall.
“Knowledge is a bigger obstacle to problem-solving than ignorance.”
Split illustration showing a man livestreaming from a home office on one side, connected across a globe by a glowing arc to a group of friends watching him on a laptop at an outdoor Paris cafe with the Eiffel Tower visible on the other side.
“If you are moving at the speed of light, you are already there.”
Illustrated comic panel of an older man in a brown tweed jacket and glasses (Marshall McLuhan) gesturing while speaking to a bearded interviewer holding a notebook and tape recorder, seated in a book-lined study with a globe nearby.
Illustrated cartoon of Marshall McLuhan in a suit, surfing on a board reading "The Medium Is the Message" atop a giant wave made of books, ancient Greek philosophers, and 20th-century pop-culture icons (Charlie Brown, Superman, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, the Beatles) surging around him.
“Control over change would seem to consist in moving with it but ahead of it.”
Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. The next logical steps would seem to be, not to translate, but to by-pass language in favor of a general cosmic consciousness which might be very like the collective unconscious dreamt of by Bergson.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 80
Quote #193
Year: 1964
Chapters: Computer | Corporate Consciousness | Extending Consciousness | Language | Predictions
When applied to new forms of electronic-messaging, such as teletext and videotext, [the computer] quickly converts sequential alphanumeric texts into multi-level signs and aphorisms, encouraging ideographic summation, like hieroglyphics. 
The Global Village with Bruce Powers, (1989), p 103 
Quote #194
Year: 1989
Chapter: Aphorism
While bemoaning the decline of literacy and the obsolescence of the book, the literari have typically ignored the immanence of the decline of speech itself. The individual word, as a store of information and feeling, is already yielding to macrocscopic gesticulation.
War and Peace in the Global Village (1968), pp 90-91
Quote #195
Year: 1968
In the age of the photograph, language takes on a graphic or iconic character, whose “meaning” belongs very little to the semantic universe, and not at all to the republic of letters.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/ROUTLEDGE edition, p 196 
Quote #196
Year: 1964
Chapter: Cartoons, Comics
The language of visual forms is, therefore, one which lies to hand as an unused Esperanto at everybody’s command.
“The Media Fit the Battle of Jericho” in Explorations 6 (1956), in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 300 
Quote #197
Year: 1956
Chapters: Cartoons, Comics | Graphic Communication | Iconic
Statement without syntax or verbalization was really statement by gesture, by mime, and by g_e_s_t_a_l_t_. This new dimension opened for human inspection by poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud l_e_ _p_a_y_s_a_g_e_ _i_n_t_é_r_i_e_u_r_,_or the countries of the mind.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 201
Quote #198
Year: 1964
Chapters: Body Language | Photography
…the possibility of a non-verbal language of macroscopic gesticulation, an interface of entire cultures.
Letter to I.A. Richards, July 12, 1968, in Letters (1987), p 355
Quote #199
Year: 1968
Chapters: Body Language | Cartoons, Comics
The future of language presents the possibility of a world without words, a wordless, intuitive world, like a technological expression of the action of consciousness. E.S.P.
“The Invisible Environment: The Future of an Erosion”, Perspecta, Vol.11, (1967), p 167, reprinted in On the Nature of Media, (2016), p 124
Quote #200
Year: 1967
Chapters: Future | Harmony | Language | Oft-Cited Quotes
If our new media constitute so complete a range of expressiveness as both to enhance and almost to supplant speech itself, then we have moved into the period of post-literacy.
“The Post-Literate Man”, 1973, Cycle 7: Essays, Short Stories, Poems for Freshman English, ed. by James Burl Hogins and Robert Earl Yaber, p 230
Quote #201
Year: 1973
Chapter: Postliteracy
The bankruptcy of speech is proclaimed by the multiplication of letters: N.R.A.s, W.P.A., O.C.D., etc.
“Education of Free Men in Democracy: the Liberal Arts,” St. Louis University Studies in honor of St. Thomas Aquinas, Vol. 1, 1947, p 48
Quote #202
Year: 1947
An immediate simulation of consciousness would by-pass speech in a kind of massive extrasensory perception, just as global thermostats could by-pass those extensions of skin and body that we call houses. Such an extension of the process of consciousness by electric simulation may easily occur in the 1960s.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition p 130
Quote #203
Year: 1964
Chapters: Language | Propaganda | Speech
Charles Chaplin assembled a mask made up of bookkeeper, music hall entertainer, gallant and romantic searcher, then with genius added a touch of Pavolva… His footwork he acquired from the Ballet Russe. This touch transformed all the other components of his image, creating an overall effect of artistic spirituality and lent great power to the crass everyday features of his mask. None of the components in his mask correspond to anything that was the private C. Chaplin. Rather he chose carefully…just those items which gave him maximum corporate appeal.
“Public and Private Sectors” (1964), pp 5-6
Quote #204
Year: 1964
Chapters: Corporate | Masks | Putting On
Languages are stuttering extensions of our five senses, in varying ratios and wavelengths. An immediate simulation of consciousness would by-pass speech in a kind of massive extrasensory perception, just as global thermostats could by-pass those extensions of skin and body that we call houses. Such an extension of the process of consciousness by electric simulation may easily occur in the 1960s.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 130
Quote #205
Year: 1964
Chapters: Language | Propaganda | Speech
Our new electric technology that extends our nerves in a global embrace has large implications for the future of language. Electric technology doesn’t need words any more than the digital computer needs numbers. Electricity points the way to an extension of the process of consciousness itself, on a world scale, and without any verbalization whatever.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 80
Quote #206
Year: 1964
The Chinese never had an alphabet, but their ideograms are pictorial translations of human gestures and relationships. As our press has become more pictorial our whole culture has become more sympathetic to Chinese art and expression. So that the very features of our culture which have intruded disruptively into the East have also brought us a basis for approaching their kind of communication.
“New Media and Political Change”, in International Journal, Vol.7, No. 3, Summer (1952) p 192
Quote #207
Year: 1952
Chapters: Body Language | China, Chinese | Graphic Communication
An immediate simulation of consciousness would by-pass speech in a kind of massive extrasensory perception, just as global thermostats could by-pass those extensions of skin and body that we call houses. Such an extension of the process of consciousness by electric simulation may easily occur in the 1960s
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 130
Quote #208
Year: 1964
Chapters: Language | Propaganda | Speech
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