A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Viewing chapter Bomb (20 quotes)
The Hiroshima bomb was named “Gilda” in honor of Rita Hayworth.
The Mechanical Bride, (1951), p 99
Quote #666
Year: 1951
The nuclear bomb is not hardware. It ends war as a means of international power play.
Culture Is Our Business, 1970, p 66
Quote #667
Year: 1970
The Bomb is electric software. It inspires nightmares of population explosions in the old nineteenth-century minds. There is no finish line.
Culture Is Our Business, 1970, p 334 (final line in the book)
Quote #668
Year: 1970
This is a characteristic situation. That bomber pilot is very much like the person introducing any new technology using ordinary human business resources and existing institutional means.
“Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 286
Quote #669
Year: 1979
Instead of creeping into the bowels of the earth, science will enable us to hide out in some inaccessible time pocket until the atomic clouds have cleared and biological warfare has quieted down.
The Mechanical Bride, 1951, p 93
Quote #670
Year: 1951
The Bomb, like automation, is a new environment consisting of a network of information and feedback loops. In moving from the mechanical to the electronic age, we move from the world of the wheel to the world of the circuit. And where the wheel was a fragmenting environment, the circuit is an integrating environmental process. The Bomb, as pure information, consists of higher learning. It is, as it were, the extension division of the modern university in its highest research areas, creating a very tight environment indeed.”
“Cybernetics and Human Culture” (1954), in Understanding Me, (2003), p 47
Quote #671
Year: 1954
The grammar of the atom bomb we have not yet begun to grasp.
NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, 1960, General Introductions to Charts, p 11
Quote #672
Year: 1960

Drawn to McLuhan #10

Black-and-white illustrated diptych with a bold headline banner, featuring pen-and-ink style portraits of two men (labeled George Meredith and James Joyce) each with a speech bubble of quoted text and a caption giving their names, nationalities, and life dates.
Photorealistic image of a grand library hall with a sign reading "Robo-losophers," lined with curtained booths labeled with names of philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, etc.), each containing a robotic/statue figure, while students converse in the aisle.
“The means that are destroying our tradition, our culture, and values, could be used to preserve and sustain them.”
Color illustration of an oversized, glowing television set surrounded by a dense field of empty speech bubbles and broken eggshells, with small crowds of people gathered below on either side.
“The advent of TV may carry us beyond speech altogether.”
Color cartoon illustration of a pilot and a woman eating at an airport café table, the woman saying in a speech bubble that the pilot “said to the pilot, ‘Knock knock’…”, with an airliner and ground crew visible through the window.
“Our time has discovered that there is a language of Forms and Gestures – a language which has its own grammar and syntax.”
Color cartoon illustration of scientists in lab coats dancing amid laboratory equipment, one exclaiming in a speech bubble about subatomic particles, in a particle physics lab set.
“Science and magic have married each other.”
Photorealistic image of an older man laughing heartily at the head of a seminar table, surrounded by smiling students, in front of a blackboard in a book-lined classroom.
“I want a career where I get to laugh a lot.”
Color illustration of an older, bespectacled man in a tweed jacket seated at a cluttered writing desk in a book-lined study, scratching his head while writing, with a copy of "Understanding Media" stacked nearby.
“I don’t pretend to understand my stuff. After all, my writing is very difficult.”
Color illustration of dejected, unemployed-looking people sitting on a city sidewalk holding cardboard signs ("MBA Was Useless," "College Degree $0 Return"), while a line of business-suited robots carrying briefcases walks past in the background.
“How much more Know-How is needed to make human life obsolete?”
Color illustration of a bespectacled man in a suit with three overlapping, motion-blurred heads (as if spinning), pointing toward a spinning desk globe encircled by ribbons labeled "Global Village" and "Medium Is the Message."
“Globes make my head spin. By the time I’ve located the place, they’ve changed the boundaries.”
Photo composite of two "hear no evil, see no evil" style classical marble busts (Plato covering his ears, Aristotle covering his eyes) beside a sepia-toned portrait photograph of an older man in a suit resting his chin on his hand, with a speech bubble of quoted text above them and name captions below.
“Why has no one in history — not Plato, certainly not Aristotle, no philosopher, ever regarded our technologies grammatically, asking how they inflect on us?”
“We live science fiction. The bomb is our environment. The bomb is of higher learning all compact, the extension division of the university.”
“Notes on Burroughs” (1964), in Media Research, 1995, p 90
Quote #673
Year: 1964
Chapter: Anticipating Change
Under present-day electronic conditions the total human environment becomes made of information. The electronic bomb, for example, is almost pure information. In terms of hardware it only weighs a few ounces, but the whole power of the thing and its whole relation to mankind is informational circuitry.
Electronics & the Physics Drop-out. This Magazine Is About Schools, 1966, p 37
Quote #674
Year: 1966
“The hydrogen bomb is history's exclamation point. It ends an age-long sentence of manifest violence!”
The Medium Is the Massage, 1967, p 138
Quote #675
Year: 1967
The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb.
Playboy Interview, 1969, reprinted in The Essential McLuhan, (1995), p 238
Quote #676
Year: 1969
Chapter: Satirist
Overkill, the technologies for total destruction of mankind and the planet, create a "peace" that passeth all technology. Bernard Mandeville built his Fable of the Bees on the same observation: "Private vices, public benefits."
From Cliché To Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 46
Quote #677
Year: 1970
To divert electrical energy and circuitry into atomic bombs shows the same imaginative power as wiring the dining-room chairs to enable one to electrocute the sitter in the event that he might prove hostile.
From Cliché to Archetype, with Wilfred Watson, 1970, p 202
Quote #678
Year: 1970
The Bomb is electric software. It inspires nightmares of population explosions in the old nineteenth-century minds. There is no finish line.
Culture is our Business, 1970, p 334 (final line in the book)
Quote #679
Year: 1970
Thus, in the scientific order, it was not the "answers" that presented the problem in the case of the atom bomb , but the question: "Can the atom be split?" Working backwards, as always, in the conditions of electric information, one need only know the right question in order to find the right answer.
Politics as Theatre, in Performing Arts in Canada 10 (4), p 15 (Winter 1973)
Quote #680
Year: 1973
Chapter: Problem Solving
“In the atomic world, access to “the button” is not dependent upon human learning and letters, but only on bureaucratic authority.
Living at the Speed of Light, 1974 Speech, transcript, p 16
Quote #681
Year: 1974
The bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images.
From a page of one-liners given to Gerald Feigen in the early 1970s
Quote #682
Year: 1970
“The Bomb takes over all earlier technology and organization.”
“Cybernetics and Human Culture” (1954), in Understanding Me, (2003), p 48
Quote #683
Year: 1954
This is a characteristic situation. That bomber pilot is very much like the person introducing any new technology using ordinary human business resources and existing institutional means.”
Man and Media, 1979, in Understanding Me, 2003, p 286
Quote #684
Year: 1979
The meaning of the atomic bomb is that we can no longer fight territorial wars as a sort of solo game-playing, so beloved of the left-hemisphere.”
The Global Village with Bruce Powers, (1989), p 93
Quote #685
Year: 1989
© The Estate of Marshall McLuhan