A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
Β©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

Your search term is Aphorism. Scroll down for the results!

πŸ” Search Within Selection

Aphorism is being viewed as a chapter. Search for all appearances

Viewing chapter Aphorism (19 quotes)
FRANCIS KEPPEL [President, General Learning Corporation]: I admit it is extraordinarily difficult to react to poetry with prose. I am also reminded from long connections with my Canadian neighbour that we can speak with a degree of frankness. After all, [Prime Minister] Pearson once remarked that we share 3,000 miles of unguarded remarks. I am also rather sensitive to the fact that, if I am using the right language, to interface with epigrams is to be a damn fool. MCLUHAN: That, sir, is an epigram. KEPPEL: That, sir, was my intention. MCLUHAN: We got the message.
β€œThe Hardware-Software Mergers: How Successful Have They Been?”, Followup to speech given at the conference, Reappraisal of the Educational Technology Industry, University of Chicago, November 16-18, 1969. Transcript, p 7
Quote #391
Year: 1969
Chapter: Dialogue
Dear Ann: Are you familiar with the McLuhan Dew Line Newsletter? The last issue carried as a bonus a new deck of playing cards called the "Dew Line Deck." It is for the playing of management games as well as the conventional games. On each card there is an outrageous aphorism, such as "Thanks for the mammaries” If anybody deals a card or two to a group of associates or subordinates, or if a single card is picked by the Chairman, the request is: "Relate this aphorism to your top hang-up”.
Letter to Ann Landers, December 17, 1969, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 393
Quote #392
Year: 1969
The myth, like the aphorism and maxim, is characteristic of oral culture. For, until literacy deprives language of his multi-dimensional resonance, every word is a poetic world unto itself, a "momentary deity" or revelation, as it seemed to non-literate men.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 25
Quote #393
Year: 1962
When it is understood how entirely oral these thesis defenses were, it is easier to see why the students of such arts would need to have memories furnished with a large repertory of aphorisms and sententiae.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 102
Quote #394
Year: 1962
For Francis Bacon, as much as for Abelard, "writing in aphorisms" rather than in "methods" was the difference between keen analysis and mere public persuasion.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 102
Quote #395
Year: 1962
In The Advancement of Learning, which is itself shaped as a public oration, Bacon prefers, on intellectual grounds, the scholastic technique of aphorism to the Ciceronian method of explicit spelling out of information in the form of continuous prose:
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 102
Quote #396
Year: 1962
But the "disjointed sentences" and endless alliterations such as Augustine used for his popular "rhymed sermons" are the necessary norm of oral prose and poetry alike. (Witness the Elizabethan Euphues.) It is easy to gauge the degree of acceptance of print culture in any time or country by its effect in eliminating pun, point, alliteration, and aphorism from literature. Thus, the Latin countries even today retain maxims, sententiae, and aphorism at a respectable level.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 103
Quote #397
Year: 1962

Drawn to McLuhan #2

Two-panel comic illustration of a boxing match: a humanoid figure made of tumbling alphabet letters wearing "BRECE" shorts faces off against a muscular boxer with a smartphone for a head, under a "LITERACY VS ELECTRONIC" ring sign; in the second panel the smartphone boxer knocks the letter-man apart with a "K.O." punch.
β€œIt may even prove to be the case that the entire tradition of phonetic writing, which is co-extensive with our Western world and the Graeco-Roman tradition, cannot sustain the electronic impact.”
Illustrated period scene of a man in early-1900s suit and cap stepping into a Ford Model T outside the "Biograph Theatre" marquee advertising "The Artful Dodger," with a thought bubble above showing rows of parked cars at an outdoor movie screening.
β€œNew means create new goals.”
Illustrated interior of a rustic coffee shop with several patrons seated separately, each connected by small thought-bubble trails to one large shared blank thought bubble overhead, suggesting wordless, intuitive communication.
β€œThe future of language presents the possibility of a world without words, a wordless, intuitive world, like a technological extension of the action of consciousness.”
Illustration set in a lush jungle showing a feather-adorned Indigenous tribesman facing a translucent glowing green humanoid figure whose body is composed of streaming binary code.
β€œThe new electronic man and pre-literate man see eye to eye.”
Stylized line-art illustration of an elevated highway with a bright yellow central lane sweeping up into a sharp architectural peak, flanked by a modern city skyline of glass skyscrapers.
β€œThe road is our major architectural form.”
Illustration of a cluttered living room where a mother holds a baby on a couch surrounded by several children, most staring blankly at an unseen glowing television screen while a teenager scrolls a phone.
β€œWe are not the true parents of our children.”
Illustrated lineup of warriors and soldiers spanning history left to right β€” an Indigenous fighter, Roman legionaries, a medieval knight, WWI and modern soldiers, a futuristic armored figure, and an astronaut on the moon β€” set against a backdrop of fire, smoke, and space.
β€œWe put on our technology as evolutionary clothing.”
Comic-style illustration of a robed orator gesturing dramatically from a pedestal, his speech rendered as a jumbled speech bubble of scrambled Greek letters, while an assistant arranges the same letters into ordered puzzle pieces spelling Greek words like "ΑΑΕ΀Η" and "Ξ”Ξ™ΞšΞ‘Ξ™ΞŸΞ£Ξ₯ΝΗ" on a scroll.
β€œWriting is the spatialization of thought.”
The YouTube logo: a red rounded rectangle with a white play-button triangle beside the black "YouTube" wordmark on a black background.
[With electronic media, we are building] β€œβ€¦a new tribal encyclopedia of auditory incantation”
And the symboliste revival of oral culture not only began first in Latin countries but relied much on "disjointed sentences" and aphorism. Seneca and Quintilian, like Lorca and Picasso, were Spaniards for whom auditory modes were of great authority.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 103
Quote #398
Year: 1962
One of them is timeless, and the other is right on the focal point of the sixteenth century metamorphosis via print. First, then, the matter of the proverb, the maxim, the aphorism, as an indispensable mode of oral society.
The Gutenberg Galaxy : The Making of Typographic Man , (1962), p 104
Quote #399
Year: 1962
The implication of this visual approach for the oral aphorism, and for the compendia of sentences, adages, and maxims which had been the medieval staple of learning, was recession.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 104
Quote #400
Year: 1962
Bacon has much to say of Solomon as the forerunner of himself. In fact, he derives (pp. 39-40) his pedagogical theory of aphorism from Solomon: …
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 190
Quote #401
Year: 1962
Without having studied modern art and poetry, [Innis] yet discovered how to arrange his insights in patterns that nearly resemble the art forms of our time. Innis presents his insights in a mosaic structure of seemingly unrelated and disproportioned sentences and aphorisms.
β€œIntroduction”, in The Bias of Communication by H.A. Innis (1964), p 5
Quote #402
Year: 1964
Francis Bacon never tired of contrasting hot and cool prose. Writing in "methods" or complete packages, he contrasted with writing in aphorisms, or single observations such as "Revenge is a kind of wild justice.”
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p31
Quote #403
Year: 1964
The passive consumer wants packages, but those, he suggested, who are concerned in pursuing knowledge and in seeking causes will resort to aphorisms, just because they are incomplete and require participation in depth.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 31
Quote #404
Year: 1964
In the same way. Socrates founded dialectic by writing. Those pre-Socratics had no systems and no dialectic and committed their insights to aphorisms which are figures without ground and without context. I am looking into the kinds of supposed context which have been attributed to the pre-Socratics, and I suspect that they are non-existent.
Letter to Thomas Langan, March 2, 1972, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 451
Quote #405
Year: 1972
Depth awareness is created by parallel suggestion, not by connected statement. YeatsΒ΄s observation [regarding β€œemotion of multitude”] can also be found in Bacon, who writes on the modes of aphorism as contrasted with "writing in Method," in his Advancement of Learning: "Aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire farther; whereas Methods, carrying the show of a total, do secure men, as if they were at farthest." Even the ad agencies know that to sell a car or a coat they must present the satisfactions in figure-ground relationship that will create the desired psychic effects.
β€œThe Argument: Causality in the Electric World”, in Technology and Culture, Vol.14, No. 1, January (1973), p 15, reprinted in McLuhan Unbound # 3, (2005), p 26
Quote #406
Year: 1973
In the early part of the electric age Sam Butler, a biologist, to whom we owe the aphorism, "It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all”.
β€œArt as Survival in the Electric Age” (1973), in Understanding Me (2003), p 210
Quote #407
Year: 1973
Chapter: McLuhanisms & Zingers
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 #408
Year: 1989
Chapter: After Language
β€œAphorisms, as Francis Bacon said, are incomplete, a bit like cartoons.”
Eric McLuhan, quoted in Reflections On and By McLuhan (1997), p 45
Quote #409
Year: 1997
© The Estate of Marshall McLuhan