A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Viewing chapter Anonymous History (6 quotes)
“Chairs of anonymous history ought to be created, with the task not only of showing how facts and figures are to be gathered, but of showing their impact on culture and their meaning for us.”
Sigfried Giedion
Foreword, Mechanization Takes Command, 1948, p vi
Quote #275
Year: 1948
Chapter: Anonymous History
Giedion influenced me profoundly. Space, Time and Architecture was one of the great events of my lifetime. Giedion gave us a language for tackling the structural world of architecture and artifacts of many kinds in the ordinary environment. He learned this language from his preceptor, Wölfflin, whose principles of art history revolutionized the entire language of art criticism at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century… Giedion began to study the environment as a structural, artistic work – he saw language in streets, buildings, the very texture of form.
“The Hot and Cool Interview with Gerald Stearn“, in McLuhan: Hot & Cool: A Primer For The Understanding Of & A Critical Symposium With A Rebuttal By McLuhan ,(1967), p 263, reprinted in Marshall McLuhan Essays Media Research : Technology Art Communication, (1997), p 48
Quote #276
Year: 1967
The Swiss cultural historian Giedion has had to invent the concept "anonymous history" in order to write an account of the new technological culture in Anglo-Saxondom.
“Media Log”, In Explorations 4, (1955), p 53
Quote #277
Year: 1955
It is quite evident that Innis was not prepared for all this. No individual can ever be adequate to grappling with the vision of what Sigfried Giedion calls ‘anonymous history´. That is to say, the vision of the significance of the multitude of personal acts and artefacts which constitute the total social process which is human communication or participation.
“The Later Innis" Queen's Quarterly, Vol. 60, No 3, Autumn (1953), p 386, reprinted in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 40
Quote #278
Year: 1953
This indifference is shared by the artist "since Cezanne." A great art historian like Sigfried Giedion has extrapolated the new art approaches to space since Cezanne to include "popular culture" and "anonymous history." Art is for him as inclusive an idea as "mimesis" is for Aristotle.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), p 65
Quote #279
Year: 1962
The approach of Mr. Ivins [Prints and Visual Communication, 1953] readily reveals why historians until recent times “have rarely found anything they were not looking for," (p. 4), This remark of Mr. Ivins reinforces the insight of Sigfried Giedion in Mechanization Takes Command that “anonymous history" must be the students’ main resource today. ‘Anonymous history” is without a point of view, since it is the actual mosaic of discoveries and developments which the collective and cooperative energies of men have patterned.
Introduction to Print, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June 1960, p. 59
Quote #280
Year: 1960
The great collective art of modern cities is not produced by private individuals. Press, magazines, movies, sports, and radio represent arts in which those who originate the message are so numerous as to remain anonymous.
“Baseball Is Culture” (1952), p 4
Quote #281
Year: 1952
Chapter: Individual

Drawn to McLuhan #4

Color illustration of a tired-looking mother on a cluttered couch holding a baby, surrounded by several children of different ages, most of them absorbed in phones or the television rather than each other.
"We are not the true parents of our children."
Color illustration of a hand holding a wrinkled "Monthly Megabucks" alumni loan letter with a bold red "LOAN PAYMENT OVERDUE" stamp, spotlit against a black background.
"The trouble with a cheap specialized education is you never stop paying for it."
Mixed-media illustration of a pencil-sketched woman seen from behind looking into an ornate framed mirror; her reflection, rendered in full color, shows a polished professional alter-ego against a city skyline, beneath the caption "What AI Knows About You."
"The data banks know us better than we know ourselves."
Color illustration of a devastated, cracked cityscape with skyscrapers splitting apart and toppling into a flooded street beneath a smoky orange sky.
"The contained, the distinct, the separate – our Western legacy – are being replaced by the flowing, the unified, the fused."
Color comic illustration of Superman flying between two winged, haloed angels against a cloudy blue sky, visually likening him to a medieval angel.
"Superman is the comic strip brother of the medieval angels."
Color illustration of a street musician trio playing guitar, violin, and drum on a tree-lined urban path while a diverse crowd of people dance, cartwheel, and celebrate around them.
"Sound, in this new world of dance and song, is not for listening, it's for making."
Color comic-style illustration of a pilot and a woman having breakfast in an airport cafe overlooking the tarmac, where a ground crew member signals a parked jet with semaphore flags; a speech bubble reads "Weird. He just said to the pilot, 'Knock knock'..."
"If our new media constitute so complete a range of expressiveness as both to enhance and almost to supplant speech itself, then we will have moved into the period of post-literacy."
Color cartoon of scientists in lab coats dancing among physics laboratory equipment, with a speech bubble joking about subatomic particles "dancing," while two onlookers watch in surprise from the doorway.
"Science and magic have married each other."
Color illustration of a string quartet performing on a circular stage in an ornate domed concert hall; one of the four musicians is depicted as a metallic robot playing alongside the human performers, before an applauding crowd.
"Nothing is so human about us as our technology."
Color cartoon illustration of a female stand-up comedian performing on a small club stage under a "The Laugh Comedy" marquee, with an enthusiastic audience laughing, clapping, and cheering below her.
"Manslaughter and man's laughter are spelled the same."
© The Estate of Marshall McLuhan