A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
Your search term is Between Two Ages. Scroll down for the results!
🔍 Search Within Selection
Between Two Ages is being viewed as a chapter. Search for all appearances
Viewing chapter Between Two Ages (22 quotes)
Today’s child is growing up absurd, because it lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up.
The Medium is the Massage, 1967, p. 18.
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Youth
Today we appear to be poised between two ages – one of detribalization and one of retribalization.
Between the acting of a dreadful thing,
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a Phantasma, or a hideous Dream:
The genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little Kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.
(Julius Caesar, Brutus, II, i)
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 344
Year: 1964
The “hard” sell and the “hot” line become mere comedy in the TV age, and the death of all the salesmen at one stroke of the TV axe has turned the hot American culture into a cool one that is quite unacquainted with itself.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 27
Year: 1964
Chapters:
Hot & Cool | Senses
Today we live on the frontier between five centuries of mechanism and the new electronics, between the homogenous and the simultaneous. It is painful but fruitful.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), p 141
Year: 1962
Men on frontiers, whether of time or space, abandon their previous identities. Neighborhood gives identity. Frontiers snatch it away.
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 44
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Identity
Cultures like ours, poised at the point of transformation, engender both tragic and comic awareness in great abundance. It is the maximal interplay of diverse forms of perception and experience that makes great the cultures of the fifth century B.C., the sixteenth century, and the twentieth century.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge, p 154
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Today’s Transition
As we push our electric technology it will flip/open in the form of corporate consciousness. The present interim is baffling because it has a closed character, with which we know not how to deal. An electric system is very much like a small tribal society—that is, ecological and homeostatic.
Letter to John I. Snyder, Jr., August 4, 1963, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 291
Year: 1963
Drawn to McLuhan #12
This strange gap between the specialist, visual world and the integral, auditory world needs to be better understood today above all, for it contains the key to an understanding of what automation and cybernetics imply.
“Cybernation and Culture” (1966), pp 97-98
Year: 1966
However, the older world of roles had lingered on as a ghost just as after a century of electricity the West still feels the presence of the older values of literacy and privacy and separateness.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), p 14
Year: 1962
Chapter:
Values & Value Judgments
The antithetic electric power of instant information that reverses social explosion into implosion, private enterprise into organization man, and expanding empires into common markets, has obtained as little recognition as the written word. The power of radio to retribalize mankind, its almost instant reversal of individualism into collectivism, Fascist or Marxist, has gone unnoticed. So extraordinary is this unawareness that it is what needs to be explained. The transforming power of media is easy to explain, but the ignoring of this power is not at all easy to explain. It goes without saying that the universal ignoring of the psychic action of technology bespeaks some inherent function, some essential numbing of consciousness such as occurs under stress and shock conditions.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 304
Year: 1964
We must understand that a totally new society is coming into being, one that rejects all our old values, conditioned responses, attitudes and institutions.
Playboy Interview (1969), in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 252
Year: 1969
The conflict between the new “inner trip” and the old outer trip in truck or jalopy is characteristic of the larger flip in our current society.
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 15
Year: 1970
The new corporate identity of electronic man has arrived so suddenly that it still coexists with private and individual identity.
“Mr. Nixon and the Dropout Strategy”, in The New York Times, July 29, (1973), p E13
Year: 1973
We’re now living in a world which pushes the right hemisphere way up because it’s an all-at-once world. The right hemisphere, by pushing up into dominance, is making the old left hemisphere world, which is our educational establishment, our political establishment, make it look very foolish.
“What Television Does Best,” NBC TV appearance with To m Snyder (1976), in “McLuhan Speaks” transcript, p 2
Year: 1976
Chapter:
Hemispheres of the Brain
Modem physicists are not aware of the acoustic character of the space which they now assign to "the chemical bond." Scientists are still embalmed in the old visual space that is uniform, continuous and connected.
“The Papal Interval” (1969), unpublished typescript, p 3
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Untapped Potentials
And, whereas the mechanical age had been one of center-margin structures, the electronic age is inevitably one of multiple centres-without-margins. Under conditions of simultaneity of access to information, Cuba is not a margin politically, nor is Laos. They are centres as much as London or Moscow or Washington, yet our assumptions are still otherwise. Hence our confusion.
“The Humanities in the Electronic Age” (1961), in McLuhan Unbound (2003), p 15
Year: 1961
Chapters:
Centralized / Decentralized | Dialogue
Indeterminancy [in physics] was a figure/ground problem arising from incongruity between the visual bias of classical science and the new acoustic sensibilities.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 44
Year: 1988
[E]lectronic man starts with the effects desired and then looks around for the means to those effects, whereas the old visual culture had accepted all the available means as a kind of destiny...
“Liturgy and the Microphone”, (1974), p 17
Year: 1974
Chapter:
Effect
Until Newton the Senecans had dominated the literary scene from Montaigne to Pascal and from Donne to Pope. Their preoccupation was with the literary techniques for arresting and projecting some phase of the human mind: to arrest in order to project, and to project in order to contemplate. Like the inventors of cinema at the beginning of this century they hit upon the technique of stylistic discontinuity as a means of arresting a moment of consciousness. The movie camera takes a thousand still shots in order to capture the aspects of a brief moment. The style coupé and the “cutting period” attempted something comparable in the essay and the poem. But to have carried this art further than Pope was probably impossible. At any rate the advent of Newton’s Optics diverted artistic effort from poetic statement to the use of external landscape as a means of projecting and controlling states of mind under the guidance of two major concepts. The first of these derived from the study of the visual harmonics of the spectrum which led to a revival of the classic images of the harps of Aeolus and Memnon. If the surfaces of matter were varied prisms for revealing the qualities of light, then the entire visible and audible world could be conceived as a species of visual music. The second concept is related to the first. For, if the external world is attuned to the mind of man then the whole of Nature is a language and the poet is a pontifex or bridge between the two worlds.
“Coleridge as Artist” (1954), in The Interior Landscape (1969), pp 119-120
Year: 1954
"Jobs" represent a relatively recent pattern of work. From the fifteenth century to the twentieth century, there is a steady progress of fragmentation of the stages of work that constitute "mechanization" and "specialism." These procedures cannot serve for survival or sanity in this new time.
The Medium is the Massage (1967), p 20
Year: 1967
A Passage to India by E. M . Forster is a dramatic study of the inability of oral and intuitive oriental culture to meet with the rational, visual European patterns of experience. " Rational," of course, has for the West long meant "uniform and continuous and sequential." In other words, we have confused reason with literacy, and rationalism with a single technology. Thus in the electric age man seems to the conventional West to become irrational. In Forster's novel the moment of truth and dislocation from the typographic trance of the West comes in the Marabar Caves. Adela Quested's reasoning powers cannot cope with the total inclusive field of resonance that is India. After the Caves: " Life went on as usual, but had no consequences, that is to say, sounds did not echo nor thought develop. Everything seemed cut off at its root and therefore infected with illusion."
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 15
Year: 1964
Chapters:
Acoustic Space | West and East
One of the celebrated things about the radio generation was Gertrude Stein’s phrase, which Hemingway used as an epigraph for Farewell to Arms, “You’re the lost generation.” … Today people over twenty-one can’t adjust. We’re all in a “lost generation.” That is, in our sensory lives we will never make the switchover. Only those coming up through the nursery will.”
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 89
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Change | Today’s Transition