A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Viewing chapter Discovery (7 quotes)
"We are entering the new age of education that is programmed for discovery rather than instruction."
Marshall McLuhan
Introduction to the Second Edition of Understanding Media, (Signet paperback edition, 1966) p. x.
Quote #1586
Year: 1966
Chapters: Discovery | Education
Discovery, exploration, probing is much more proper to the inhabitants of an electronic environment, because the amount of information available is beyond anybody’s wish or need for instructional purposes. Nobody wants to know all. What we desperately do need is to know the pattern that structures that, this or that.
“Joyce and T(hunder)elevision (1966)”, audio-recorded lecture, transcript, pp 13-14
Quote #1587
Year: 1966
Chapter: Education
It might be possible to solve any problem by organizing our ignorance; there’s always one guy who’s so ignorant he can’t help but see the answer. That’s called discovery.
Quoted from a 1976 McLuhan Seminar by Thomas W. Cooper his dissertation, Pioneers in Communication: The Lives and Thought of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, University of Toronto, 1979, p 207
Quote #1588
Year: 1976
Chapters: Ignorance | Philosophy | Problem Solving
This is the real use of the computer, not to expedite marketing or solve technical problems but to speed the process of discovery and orchestrate terrestrial—and eventually galactic—environments and energies. Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness.
Playboy interview (19169), in Essential McLuhan (UK edition, 1997), p 253
Quote #1589
Year: 1916
Chapter: Computer
We now experience simultaneously the dropout and the teach-in. The two forms are correlative. They belong together. The teach-in represents an attempt to shift education from instruction to discovery, from brainwashing students to brainwashing instructors. It is a big, dramatic reversal. Vietnam, as the content of the teach-in, is a very small and perhaps misleading Red Herring. It really has little to do with the teach-in, as such, any more than with the dropout.
The Medium Is the Massage (1967), p 101
Quote #1590
Year: 1967
Chapter: Dropout
It will be possible in this generation, I hope, to program the environment in such a way that we can learn a second language as we learned our mother tongue, rapidly and totally, as a means of perception and of discovery. The future of language presents the possibility of a world without words, a wordless, intuitive world, like a technological expression of the action of consciousness. E.S.P.
“The Invisible Environment: The Future of an Erosion”, Perspecta, Vol.11, (1967), p 167, reprinted in On the Nature of Media, (2016), p 124
Quote #1591
Year: 1967
Chapters: Education | Language | Predictions
The age of lecture and of teacher up front passing out data is behind us. The students must now become part of the team engaged in discovery. Discovery, not the mere accumulation of data.
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 88
Quote #1592
Year: 1967
Chapter: Education
What you’re really saying is: How can we arrange a museum or an art gallery so it gives people that sensation of power, of tremendous new discovery, of insight and perception? I think it is possible. That’s what Harley [Parker] was trying to do with his juxtaposition, trying to rub one thing against the other to release the sense of discovery.
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 154
Quote #1593
Year: 1967
Chapter: Museum

Drawn to McLuhan #6

Three-panel comic illustration of a vintage tube-radio-style robot wrapping a woman in strips of punched ticker tape printed with algorithmic text, with a close-up of the text-covered tape and a final panel of the woman standing beside the robot.
“With computers we are taped typed and scrubbed.”
Two-panel cartoon: in the left panel a man in overalls repairs a disassembled humanoid robot on a workbench; in the right panel the now-functional robot welds metal while the man, startled, carries a box of parts away.
“We make our tools and our tools remake us.”
Sketch-style illustration of three figures — a young woman with a backpack, a man in a blue jacket, and an elderly man with a cane — walking away down a country road in different directions, looking back over their shoulders.
“We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
Split illustration: an office scene with a locked "Suggestions" box and potted plant beside a doorway, leading into an industrial room where a worker in a yellow hazmat suit and gas mask uses tongs to feed a paper into a glowing furnace.
“The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.”
Illustration of human hands and robotic hands collaboratively assembling and sanding a wooden triangular frame (resembling an impossible/Penrose triangle) on a workbench covered with tools, screws, and blueprints.
“The future work of mankind is to achieve relevance.”
Stylized illustration of four vintage guitar cases leaning against a brick wall beside a "Stage Entrance" sign and band posters reading "Hollow Notes" and "Folk."
“The future of consciousness is already assuming a very different pattern, a very different character.”
Colorful cartoon illustration of a diverse crowd of people singing, dancing, and playing instruments (guitar, violin, drum) together along a tree-lined city park path.
“Sound, in this new world of dance and song, is not for listening, it’s for making.”
Cartoon illustration of a man in a suit walking down a hallway toward three doors marked with male, female, and a half-blue/half-orange question-mark restroom symbols.
“Sex as we now think of it may soon be dead.”
Comic-style caricature of a wild-haired pianist in a tuxedo mid-performance at a grand piano, mouth wide open with piano-key teeth, one hand raised and the other holding a concert program, an audience visible in the background.
“Mine is a transformation theory: how people are changed by the instruments they employ.”
Satirical oil painting in an ornate gilded frame depicting a shirtless man on a rearing horse against a mountain steppe landscape, styled as classical equestrian portraiture, with a nameplate on the frame.
"It is a characteristic of all social processes that they become manifest and conspicuous at the moment of their demise."
Cartoon illustration of two robots seated in a futuristic control room, monitoring screens labeled "Live Gum Interaction," "Wrigley Consumption," and other real-time metrics, with a pair of hands unwrapping a stick of gum shown on a central display.
“Each stick of gum we reach for is acutely noted by some computer that translates out least gesture into a new probability curve.”
© The Estate of Marshall McLuhan