A dictionary of Marshall McLuhanβs quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
Β©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Breakdown as breakthrough.
Marshall McLuhan
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 27
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Breakdown as Breakthrough
The handwritten book was a broken road which was traveled slowly and infrequently. It kept the reader close to the dimensions of oral discourse.
"Joyce, MallarmοΏ½οΏ½ and the Press", in The Sewanee Review, Vol.62, No.1, Jan-March (1954), p 41, reprinted in The Interior Landscape The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan, (1969), p 8.
Year: 1954
In other words, the book β with the aid of the computer and the telephone and Xerox β is becoming a completely flexible service. This pattern, as it enters the world of education, means that instruction in the older classroom sense will tend to yield, is already tending to yield, to discovery as a technique of learning.
βInformation Hunt Looms Bigβ (1967), p 4
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Education
There are many ways in which the book and literate values are threatened by the mere fact of the electric service environment.Β
βThe Future of the Bookβ (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 175Β
Year: 1972
In Le Livre [MallarmΓ©] turns to scrutinize the press once more, opening with the proposition, self-evident to him, that the whole world exists in order to result in a book. This is a matter of metaphysical fact, that all existence cries out to be raised to the level of scientific or poetic intelligibility. In this sense βthe bookβ confers on things and persons another mode of existence which helps to perfect them. And it is plain that MallarmΓ© regarded the press as this encyclopedic book in its most rudimentary form.
"Joyce, MallarmΓ© and the Press", in The Sewanee Review, Vol.62, No.1, Jan-March (1954), p 48-49, reprinted in The Interior Landscape The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan, (1969), p 15.
Year: 1954
And the cheap and rapid multiplication of books not only extended the audience for books, but it changed the methods of study and teaching from a social toa private mode. There arose the cult of privacy.
βTechnology and Political Change,β International Journal, Vol 7, No. 3, Summer, (1952), p 190
Year: 1952
When millions of volumes can be compressed in a matchbox space, it is not merely the book but the library that becomes portable.
βThe Future of the Bookβ, 1972, in Understanding Me (2002), p 174-175
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Predictions
Not βobsoleteβ but βobsolescentβ is the term that applies to my analysis of the present state of the printed book. Obsolesdence often precedes an extraordinary development in technology. The arrival of electric xerography certainly does not mean the end of the book, but rather a great enlargement of it scope and function. Earlier, photo-engraving and also photography had transformed the world of typography and of book production.β
Letter to the Editor, Life magazine, March 1, 1966, in Letters (1987), p 334
Year: 1966
Chapter:
LOM 2 - Obsolesce
Drawn to McLuhan #3
Gutenberg made all history SIMULTANEOUS: the transportable book brought the world of the dead into the space of the gentlemanβs library; the telegraph brought the entire world of the living to the workmanβs breakfast table.
βFive Sovereign Fingers Taxed the Breathβ, in Shenandoah the Washington and Lee University Review, Vol VI No. 1, Autumn (1955), p 51, reprinted in Explorations 4, (1955), p 32 later reprinted in Explorations in communication: an Anthology (1960), p 208, Also appears in alternative contexts and formats as part of Verbi-Voco-visual Explorations, (1967), Counter Blast (1969), p 15, Essential McLuhan (1995), pages 210 and 286
Year: 1955
The future of the book is the blurb.
Quoted by B.W. Powe in βMM The Put-On,β in A Climate Charged, 1985
Year: 1985
Chapter:
Future
The printed page in rendering the language of the face and gesture illegible has also caused the abstract media of printed words to become the main bridge for the inter-awareness of spiritual and mental states.
βCulture without Literacyβ, in Explorations #1, December (1953), p 122-123 reprinted in Essential McLuhan, (1995), p 308, additional reprint in Media Research Technology, Art and Communication (1997), p 132, and McLuhan Unbound #6, (2017)
Year: 1953
Chapters:
Body Language | Predictions
It was the English poets of the 18th century who rebelled against the linear perspectives of the printed page and who explicitly attacked book culture as an unconscious block in the sensibility of their time. Coleridge pointed out that the poetry of his own day was tending towards the flat landscape of the Chinese painters.
βSpace, Time and Poetryβ, in Explorations 4 (1955), p 62, (2016) reprint, p 57, reprinted as McLuhan Unbound #13, (2005), p 14
Year: 1955
It is the normal aspect of our information-flow which is revolutionary now. The new media normalize that state of revolution which is war. Two hundred years ago it was idea and theory which disrupted the old regimes. Now it is just the packaged information which we call entertainment which transforms living conditions and basic attitudes. It is the ordinary flow of news and pictures from every quarter of the globe which rearranges our intellectual and emotional lives without either struggle or acceptance on our part.
βThe new art or science which the electronic or post mechanical age has to invent concerns the alchemy of social change,β in Explorations 8, October (1957), unnumbered page βsection 14β, Issue later reprinted as Verbi-Voco-Visual, (1967), also unpaginated
Year: 1957
The book is a more passive form than radio, it is more completely packaged form of information.
βThe Electric Revolution in North Americaβ (1959), p 9
Year: 1959
I haven't even asked myself much about the effects on laser on printing, the laser beam and channel 87, on the cable TV, which can print books and dump them into your living room very fast.
Authors Luncheon Speech, December, 1969, transcript p 10
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Predictions
One media development has been to open the possibility for the student to request a book made to his specifications and needs when existing libraries become linked by computer to Xerox services. The printed book, having begun as the first commodity package, is now ready to become an information service to individual needs.
βGreat Change-overs for youβ, in Vogue, Vol. 148, No. 1, July 1st (1966), p 63
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Predictions
Thus the future of the book is nothing less than to be the means of surpassing Nature itself. The material world, as it were, is to be etherealized and encapsulated in a book whose characters will possess all the formulas for the knowledge and recreation of Being.
βDo Books Matter?β (1973), pp 38-39
Year: 1973
Chapters:
Future | Predictions
These are the sentiments, too, of Wordsworth and Coleridge, of Shelley and Keats and the pre-Raphaelites, even of Ruskin. They began to talk instead in terms of the old medieval language of the Book of Nature. Any book except the printed book was better for the spirit of man.
βCommunication Media: Makers of the Modern Worldβ (1959), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 33
Year: 1959
Static segmentation of the scribal motion is the base of print technology, leading to the book which is the first teaching machine.
Introduction to Print, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 47
Year: 1960
Print made possible individualism because the book as private teaching machine fostered initiative and self-reliance.
Introduction to Print, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 48
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Individual
As with [the] movie, the book reader seems to enter into himself and to create a world of privacy and isolation.
Introduction to film (movies), in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 114
Year: 1960
The book had steadily undermined the nature and role of the dialogue in teaching as everywhere else.
Introduction to radio, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 122
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Dialogue
The book was the first mass-produced commodity.
βPopular / Mass Cultureβ (1960), in Understanding Me (1995), p 15
Year: 1960
The book thrives as never before, but its form is no longer constitutive or dominant.
βInside the Five Sense Sensoriumβ (1961), p 54
Year: 1961
For the cartoon appeals to natives as it does to our children, because it is a world in which the visual component is so small that the viewer has as much to do as in a crossword puzzle.
The Gutenberg Galaxy : The Making of Typographic Man , (1962), p 39
Year: 1962
Chapter:
Global Village
More important still, with the bounding line of a cartoon, as with a cave painting, we tend to be in an area of the interplay of the senses, and hence of strongly haptic or tactile character.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man , (1962), p 39
Year: 1962
Could a portable, private instrument like the new book take the place of the book one made by hand and memorized as one made it?
The Gutenberg Galaxy : The Making of Typographic Man , (1962), p 145
Year: 1962
Two cultures or technologies can, like astronomical galaxies, pass through one another without collision; but not without change of configuration.
The Gutenberg Galaxy : The Making of Typographic Man , (1962), p 149
Year: 1962
The printed book based on typographic uniformity and repeatability in the visual order was the first teaching machine, just as typography was the first mechanization of a handicraft.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 174
Year: 1964
The form [of the book] is not a communal mosaic or corporate image but a private voice.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 204
Year: 1964
The book is a private confessional form that provides a "point of view." The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. It can "color" events by using them or by not using them at all. But it is the daily communal exposure of multiple items in juxtaposition that gives the press its complex dimension of human interest.β
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 204
Year: 1964
Chapter:
News
β¦the printed book had been the first mass-produced product, creating uniform prices and markets.
βThe Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment,β The University of Windsor Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, (1966), p 8, reprinted in Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968),p 251 ,and McLuhan Unbound #4, (2017), p 16
Year: 1966
One way of looking at the future of the book might be as follows: as print ceases to be the ordinary and pervasive environment, the book can be prescribed as a specific therapy for cultures where there is little or no "alpha-thinking" and a great excess of "beta-thinking." That is, to use the language of Owen Barfield in his Saving the Appearances, we can approach the book as a cultural therapy, an indispensable ingredient in communal diet, necessary for the maintenance of civilized values as opposed to tribal values.
Letter to William Jovanovich, March 9, 1966, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 335
Year: 1966
The printed book had encouraged artists to reduce all forms of expression as much as possible to the single descriptive and narrative plane of the printed word. The advent of electric media released art from this straitjacket at once, creating the world of Paul Klee, Picasso, Braque, Eisenstein, the Marx Brothers, and James Joyce.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 54
Year: 1964
The tendency is for the book to cease to be a package and to become a custom-made information service tailored to the individual needs of the reader.
From a televised interview with Eric Goldman (1966), accessible on Youtube
Year: 1966
[Printing] created the portable book, which men could read in privacy and in isolation from others. Man could now inspireβand conspire.
The Medium Is the Massage (1967), p 50
Year: 1967
Like easel painting, the printed book added much to the new cult of individualism. The private, fixed point of view became possible and literacy conferred the power of detachment, non-involvement.
The Medium Is the Massage (1967), p 50
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Individual
Perhaps nothing more bespeaks the hypnotic and irrational pressure of the book-page than the scant attention it has received as a form.
The Medium Is the Massage (1967), p 121
Year: 1967
βAuthorshipββin the sense we know it today, individual intellectual effort related to the book as an economic commodityβwas practically unknown before the advent of print technology. Medieval scholars were indifferent to the precise identity of the βbooksβ they studied. In turn they rarely signed even what was clearly their own. They were a humble service organization. Procuring texts was often a very tedious and time-consuming task. Many small texts were transmitted into volumes of miscellaneous content, very much like βjottingsβ in a scrapbook, and, in this transmission, authorship was often lostβ¦
The Medium Is the Massage (1967), p 122
Year: 1967
The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. Mechanical multiples of the same text created a publicβa reading public. The rising consumer-oriented culture became concerned with labels of authenticity and protection against theft and piracy. The idea of copyrightββthe exclusive right to reproduce, publish, and sell the matter and form of a literary or artistic workββwas born.β
The Medium Is the Massage (1967), p 122
Year: 1967
But xerography, by enabling the ordinary writer to publish or reproduce anything at all, can add a soundtrack to any book one chooses to photograph. He can add any part of any book to any other book, doing a kind of Andy Warhol montage.
βIs the Book Dead?β, in Clearing House, No. 17, 1968, p 447
Year: 1968
Gutenberg made all history available as classified data: the transportable book brought the world of the dead into the space of the gentlemen's library; the telegraph brought the entire world of the living to the workman's breakfast table.
Counterblast (1969), p 15
Year: 1969
The book speeded up and extended reading habits; but it had the effect also of splitting words and music apart. With the book came silent, solitary reading.
Counterblast (1969), p 73
Year: 1969
It means rather that the book, as it loses its monopoly as a cultural form will acquire new roles. Nobody seems to know much about why the paper-back flopped in the 30's and succeeded in the 50's. But it is a fact which probably has some relation to TV, on one hand, and to LP, on the other.
Counterblast (1969), p 98
Year: 1969
[With the printed bookβ¦] There were no more stuttering pilgrimages through the crabbed columns of manuscript abbreviations. But it was a long time before people got to be at home with print. And by that time the newspaper page layout had begun to disturb the precarious equilibrium of 18the century book culture. The format of the 19th century newspaper page was like a dozen book pages set on a single sheet. The telegraph made this format the instantaneous global cross-section of a single day. This was no longer the book. Nor could the book stand up to this new cultural form botn out of technology. The book tried to swallow this rival: Joyce in Ulysses, Eliot in The Waste Land β non-narrative epics which incorporate the newspaper art form.
Counterblast (1969), p 119
Year: 1969
I am fully aware that whereas a good book tells you βwhere itβs at,β a bad book (leading the best seller list) is an invaluable index to the panics, fears and responses of countless millions of somnambulists.
βLibraries, Past, Present, Futureβ (1970), pp 3-4
Year: 1970
In merely literary terms, nobody studies what sort of effect Dante or anybody else wanted to have on his time and his public. Instead, they study what they imagined the writer was saying to the publicβ
Letter to Ashley Montagu, October 23, 1971, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 446
Year: 1971
That is, affluence breeds poverty (not physical hardship) and learning causes ignorance (not less information), just as matter creates. Such complementarity of figure-ground appears as a causal relation in all "prepackaged" processes. Complementarity is the process whereby effects become causes.
βThe Argument: Causality in the Electric Worldβ, in Technology and Culture, Vol.14, No. 1, January (1973), p 11, reprinted in McLuhan Unbound # 3, (2005), p 19-20
Year: 1973
For communication is change, and Christianity is concerned above all and at all times with the need for change in man. St. Paul states his theory of communication everywhere.
Liturgy And Mediaβ in The Critic, Vol.31, No. 3, January-February (1973), p 21, reprinted in reprinted in The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion (1999), p 128
Year: 1973
β¦in Canada β you can never be a nation as long as we have two cultures, OK? What we need are more cultures, not fewer. It is obvious that you can not have too many cultures in an electric age. Do you think?
βJean Pare interviewβ, in Forces magazine a Hydro Quebec publication, No.22, (1973), p 26
Year: 1973
In a way, to talk about countries is just a figure of speech now. Countries refer back to some other time. Itβs like the old problem I was talking about earlier. A child of the age of twelve, today, may be a nine-hundred-year-old in terms of experience but heβs still considered a child. We have no other categories to put him in, and this is the problem of the countries and government. They are something that really disappeared a long time ago but we still have to find a place to put them for a while.
βJean Pare interviewβ, in Forces magazine a Hydro Quebec publication, No.22, (1973), p 26
Year: 1973
In today's ECO-world of electric information that flows unceasingly upon us from every side, we all encounter the predicament of Alice in Wonderland. Now effects merge with causes instantly through speedup, while "software" etherializes "hardware" by design. All rigid distinctions between thinker and doer, observer and observed, object and subject are being eroded by the "rim-spin" of electric media. Old ground rules and human perceptions are being transformed by this new resonant surround where nothing is stable but change itself. But like water to a fish, the environment we live in remains hidden. Only children and artists see "the emperor's new clothes."
βThe Argument: Causality in the Electric Worldβ, in Technology and Culture, Vol.14, No. 1, January (1973), p 1, reprinted in McLuhan Unbound # 3, (2005), 5-6
Year: 1973
Today each of us lives several hundred years in a decade.
Jean Pare interview, original transcript-typescript (1973), p 7, later printed in Forces magazine (1973), a Hydro Quebec publication, No.22
Year: 1973
The printed book, by its stress on intense visual culture, is the means of detachment and civilized objectivity in the world of profound sensuous involvement. The printed book is thus the only available means of developing habits of private initiative and private goals and objectives in the electric age.
βDo Books Matter?β (1973) p 35
Year: 1973
The extreme distraction presented by the acoustic and cinematic rivals of the book brings decreasing opportunities for attentive and uninterrupted readingβ
βDo Books Matter?β (1973), reprinted in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 210
Year: 1973
[Walking with a group through the Hall of North American Forests]. These are all very pleasing exhibits, but you might as well be turning the pages of a book.
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 115
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Museum