A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Viewing chapter Bacon, Francis (9 quotes)
Francis Bacon…was the last of the patristic encyclopedists.
Marshall McLuhan
“Education of Free Men in Democracy: The Liberal Arts”, in St. Louis University Studies in honor of St. Thomas Aquinas, Vol. 1, (1943) p 47
Quote #589
Year: 1943
Chapter: Bacon, Francis
One major discovery of the symbolists which had the greatest importance for subsequent investigation was their notion of the learning process as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties whose retracing provided the key to all arts and sciences (basis of myth of Daedalus, basic for the dreams and schemes of Francis Bacon, and, when transferred by [Giovanni Battista] Vico to philology and history of culture, it also forms the basis of modern historiography, archaeology, psychology and artistic procedures alike.
Letter to Harold Adams lnnis, March 14, 1951, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 221
Quote #590
Year: 1951
We find it hard to grasp that the Senecan Francis Bacon was in many respects a schoolman. Later, it will appear that his own "method" in science was straight out of medieval grammatica.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, 1962, p 103
Quote #591
Year: 1962
Bacon was more impressed by the meaning of print as applied knowledge than anybody. The entire Middle Ages had regarded Nature as a Book to be scanned for the vestigial dei. Bacon took the lesson of print to be that we could now literally get Nature out in a new and improved edition. An encyclopedia is envisaged. It is his complete acceptance of the idea of the Book of Nature that makes Bacon so very medieval and so very modern. But this gap is this. The medieval book of Nature was for contemplation like the Bible. The Renaissance Book of Nature was for application and use like movable types. A closer look at Francis Bacon will resolve this problem and elucidate the transition from the medieval to the modern world.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, 1962, p 165
Quote #592
Year: 1962
Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.
The Gutenberg Galaxy : The Making of Typographic Man , (1962), p 183
Quote #593
Year: 1962
Francis Bacon, PR voice for the modern, had both his feet in the Middle Ages.
The Gutenberg Galaxy : The Making of Typographic Man , (1962), p 183
Quote #594
Year: 1962
The drive towards science was, from the ancient world to the time of Bacon, a drive to extricate the visual from the other senses. But this stress was inseparable from the cultivation of manuscript and print culture. Thus the medievalism of Bacon would not have been amiss in his time.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 184
Quote #595
Year: 1962
Francis Bacon thought that the linguistic program could be extended to the entire book of Nature.
Letter to Tom Wolfe, October 25, 1965, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 327
Quote #596
Year: 1965

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.
"Stupidity is no excuse for not thinking."
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."
Francis Bacon, by the way, had a theory that the human mind is not a mirror but an “enchanted glass” full of imposture and delusion resulting from the impact of art and technology on society.
Letter to Michael Macoby, August 9, 1972
Quote #597
Year: 1972
Bacon noted, in his New Science, how visual bias interferes mischievously in the discovery of causes and distorts the understanding of final causes in particular.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 88
Quote #598
Year: 1988
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