A dictionary of Marshall McLuhanβs quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
Β©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Dialogue (25 quotes)
Jacques Ellul observes in Propaganda: When dialogue begins, propaganda ends. His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology but rather the action and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda", for this reason. It blankets perception and suppresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom.
From ClichΓ© to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 77
Year: 1970
Chapters:
Anxieties Caused By Change | Art, Artists
The global-village conditions being forged by the electric technology stimulate more discontinuity and diversity and division than the old mechanical, standardized society; in fact, the global village makes maximum disagreement and creative dialog inevitable.
βPlayboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Mediaβ. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 70, reprinted in The Essential McLuhan (1995), p 259
Year: 1969
Chapters:
Discontinuity | Divided by Media
The alternative to violence is dialogue.
Monday Conference, TV appearance in Australia, June, 1977, interviewed by the audience; transcript: 8:39
Year: 1977
For dialogue is not light on, but light through, which is the difference between film and TV.
βThe New Media and the New Education,β The Basilian Teacher, December, (1961), p 97, Portions originally published as βGrammars for the Newer Media.β In Communication in General Education: College Composition and Communication, (1960)
Year: 1961
Conversation is, for me, something like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a game in which you play all sorts of nose-dives and air-tumbles.
Letter to Pete Buckner, October 28, 1971 (LAC), quoted in Gordonβs MM: Escape into Understanding, (1997), p 283
Year: 1971
Chapters:
McLuhan on McLuhan | Playfulness
We have in the past century moved out of a mechanical into an electric, organic culture. That is, we have increasingly moved out of a segmental, specialist phase of knowledge into a period of interplay and, as it were, dialogue among all kinds of knowledge. And, whereas the mechanical age had been one of center-margin structures, the electronic age is inevitably one of multiple centres-without-margins.
βThe Humanities in the Electronic Ageβ (1967), p 15
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Between Two Ages | Centralized / Decentralized
People on frontiers have a very rich interplay with other people, other cultures.
TVO Interview with Mike McManus (1977), transcript 27:34
Year: 1977
Drawn to McLuhan #2
Xerox has completely changed the nature of conferences and has led to a much higher frequency of meetings. Xerox feeds and speeds the entire environment into the dialogue process of the conference table.
βReproduction without Taxation,β unpublished essay on Xerography, 1971, typescript, p 5
Year: 1971
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.
βThe Hardware-Software Mergers: How Successful Have They Been?β, Followup to speech given at the conference, Reappraisal of the Educational Technology Industry, University of Chicago, November 16-18, 1969. Transcript, p 7
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Aphorism
The auditory and oral heritages of some cultures are being poured through the visual tradition of other cultures to the enrichment of all. But even movies and television are very different media, so, as is natural, the same item handled through both of these become quite changed.
βA Historical Approach to the Mediaβ (1955), p 110
Year: 1955
Dialogue demands ignorance as a resource and a spur to exploration.
βRoles, Masks and Performancesβ (1971), McLuhan Unbound (2017), p 4
Year: 1971
Most men are pushed into the artist role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy.
From ClichΓ© to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 99
Year: 1970
In Bangkok, in place of subtitles, they use what is called "Adam-and-Eving." This takes the form of live Thai dialogue read through a loudspeaker by Thai actors concealed from the audience. Split-second timing and great endurance enable these actors to demand more than the best-paid movie stars of Thailand.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 296
Year: 1964
The dances that came in with TV were to matchβall the way to the Twist, which is merely a form of very unanimated dialogue, the gestures and grimaces of which indicate involvement in depth, but "nothing to say."
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 328
Year: 1964
The new pattern is one of small teams comprising clusters of diverse competencies with personnel accustomed to the crossing of functional lines in a perpetual dialogue of interpenetrating awarenesses.
βPopular / Mass Cultureβ (1960), in Understanding Me (2003), p 19
Year: 1960
If we ask what is the relation of TV to the learning process, the answer is surely that the TV image, by its stress on participation, dialogue, and depth, has brought to America new demand for crash-programming in education.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 331
Year: 1964
The programming can now include endless changes of program. It is the electric feedback, or dialogue pattern, of the automatic and computer-programmed "machine" that marks it off from the older mechanical principle of one-way movement.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 356
Year: 1964
But with electricity and automation, the technology of fragmented processes suddenly fused with the human dialogue and the need for over-all consideration of human unity.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 358
Year: 1964
What I am asking is that he [the user] set up a dialogue with these media, that he fight back, that you should not sit there watching TV, that you should have a real dialogue with it and explain to it what it is, and that you are not going to be taken in by it one little bitβ¦.This has nothing to do with programming. This has to do with this coming at you [in] βLord of the Fliesβ [manner].
TV Interview with Eric F. Goldman, βThe Open Mind, WNBC TV, 1966. Transcript, p 19
Year: 1966
Chapters:
Advice | Mastering Technology
The book had steadily undermined the nature and role of the dialogue in teaching as everywhere else.
NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 122 (βIntroduction to Radioβ)
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Book
the dropout is a person who experiences the need to set up more space between himself and things, he wants more room, he wants an interface, he wants a kind of resonant dialogue, he wants to rap, to chat and empathize with everybody about everything and this constitutes an interface of change. In dialogue people undergo change, it isn't just the passing of gossip back and forth, but it's a kind of interrelating by which people feel they are change, they are getting with it, they are getting involved, they are participating. All of these things that seems to me profoundly relate to the Rosary and to the church and the mystical body which is also amazingly, instant, surround, interface at source of change, renewal and of endless source of nourishment to everybody.
βA Matter Of Faith,β Part 1, TV episode of Father Peyton's Family Theatre (1972); Youtube; transcript: 8.26
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Catholic Church
We have in the past century moved out of a mechanical into an electric, organic culture. That is, we have increasingly moved out of a segmental, specialist phase of knowledge into a period of interplay and, as it were, dialogue among all kinds of knowledge. 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.
βThe Humanities in the Electronic Ageβ, p 15
Chapters:
Between Two Ages | Centralized / Decentralized
New materials may be learned just as were the great myths of past cultures-as fully integrated systems that resonate on several levels and share the qualities of poetry and songβ¦. The world communications net, the all-involving linkage of electric circuitry, will grow and become more sensitive. It will also develop new modes of feedback so that communication can become dialogue instead of monologue. It will breach the wall between "in" and "out" of school. It will join all people everywhere. When this has happened, we may at last realize that our place of learning is the world itself, the entire planet we live on. The little red schoolhouse is already well on its way toward becoming the little round schoolhouse.
βThe Future of Educationβ with George Leonard, Look Magazine. Feb. 21, 1967, pp. 23-25.
Year: 1967
Nothing has its meaning alone. Every figure must have its ground or environment. A single word, divorced from its linguistic ground, would be useless. A note in isolation is not music. Consciousness is corporate action involving all the senses (Latin sensus communis or "common sense" is the translation of all the senses into each other). The "meaning of meaning" is relationship. When young activists harp on "relevance," they are asking for interface or the abrasion of dialogue; they are ECO-sounding to discover where it's at.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 3
Year: 1972
The organization chart is not very necessary anymore. Itβs no longer of use. That little series of classified levels and categories, and initiatives, doesnβt obtain in business anymore. The dialogue and interplay between these levels are so considerable that they have had to cross out the organization chart these last twenty years. β¦ The business community is not motivated by disinterested passion for knowledge, but it is desperately eager to survive, and therefore its motivation in learning is considerable. I have spoken a great deal to management groups over the past twenty years, and I have always found them very flexible, very eager to learn, and they have a lot to learn in our time. Theyβre just as desperately hard-pressed by innovation in new technology as any part of the community.
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 109
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Linear and Nonlinear | Management