A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Goodbye Linearity (32 quotes)
We have all noticed how lineality has faded from the current scene. The chorus line, the stag line, the assembly line, all have gone the way of the clothes line.
Marshall McLuhan
“Inside the Five Sense Sensorium” (1961), reprinted in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 53
Year: 1961
Chapters:
Goodbye Linearity | Hemispheres of the Brain | McLuhanisms & Zingers | Satirist | Today’s Transition
There is no story line in modern art or news -- just a date line. There is no past or future, just an inclusive present.
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 112
Year: 1970
Chapter:
History
Lineal, connected, infinite, static Euclidean space gives way to a dynamic, resonating, non-lineal, non-Euclidean, finite, closed universe which folds back on itself – “On a clear day you can see the back of your head.”
“Alphabet, Mother of Invention” with Robert K. Logan, in Et Cetera (1977), p 381
Year: 1977
A newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem, environmental and invisible, as poem.
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 192
Year: 1970
Chapters:
Poetry | Symbolists
As the Western world has invested every aspect of its waking life with visual order, with procedures and spaces that are uniform, continuous and connected, it has progressively alienated itself from needful involvement in its subconscious life.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 1
Year: 1968
Chapter:
Linear and Nonlinear
The assembly line is now obsolete in the electric age because synchronization is no longer sequential. By electric tapes, synchronization of any number of different acts can be simultaneous. Thus the mechanical principle of analysis in series has come to an end. Even the wheel has now come to an end in principle, although the mechanical stratum of our culture carries it still as part of an accumulated momentum, an archaic configuration.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 152
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Simultaneity
The paradox today is that the ground of the latest Western technologies is electronic and simultaneous, and thus structurally right-hemisphere and "Oriental" and oral in its nature and effects. This situation began with the telegraph more than a century ago. Still, the overwhelming pattern of procedures in the Western world remains lineal, sequential, and connected in political and legal institutions, and also in education and commerce, but not in entertainment or art. A formula for complete chaos!
Laws of Media with Eric McLuhan (1988), p 80
Year: 1988
Chapters:
Hardware / Software | Hemispheres of the Brain | Retribalizing | Today’s Transition | Warnings
Drawn to McLuhan #6
Lewis Carroll, a non-Euclidean mathematician, was the first to denote the dilemma of a print-oriented world in his fable.
Culture Is Our Business (1970), p 68
Year: 1970
When Alice went through the vanishing point of the visual world, breaking the hardware of the looking-glass world, she became involved in a series of rapid metamorphoses, not unrelated to her tears.
Culture Is Our Business (1970), p 68
Year: 1970
Chapters:
Today’s Transition | Transform
Today the tears of Alice [in Wonderland] have been institutionalized at places like the Esalen Institute (Big Sur, California). In the July 12, 1968 issue of Life, readers are taken to the big bathtub where, forgetting sex, age and identity, the orphans of Western print culture can “scrub” their old identities by having an epic sob session.
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 68
Year: 1970
The visual man is the only detached human being that ever lived on this planet. All the other senses except sight – smell, hearing, touch, movement – are involving; they are discontinuous and unconnected. Only the electronic permits total encounter with the discontinuous and the disconnected.
“Open-Mind Surgery,” Fordham lecture, 1967, reprinted in Understanding Me (2002), p 152
Year: 1967
The dominance of either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors. Thus the lineality of the left hemisphere is reinforced by a service environment of roads and transportation, and logical or legal activities in legal administration. The dominance of the right hemisphere, on the other hand, depends upon an environment of a simultaneously resonating character, as is normal in oral societies.
“The Brain and the Media: the Two Hemispheres” (1978), typescript, p 2
Year: 1978
Chapter:
Hemispheres of the Brain
… linear instruction is not adequate to a nuclear age. The electronic is not lineal. It is total and field-like in its simultaneous relations. The images that are presented increasingly to you in ordinary living today lack this linear quality that the older kinds of experience and learning manifested. They have become more and more nuclear, global, inclusive.
Culture is Our Business: The Meaning of the New Electronic Media. NAEB journal, December, 1958, p 5
Year: 1958
Chapter:
Linear and Nonlinear
“A place for everything and everything in its place" is a feature not only of the compositor's arrangement of his type fonts, but of the entire range of human organization of knowledge and action from the sixteenth century onward.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 201
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Classification
Well, I think people who are subjected to the arrangement of language visually in lines, highly sequential and precisely rigid, develop habits of arranging their lives, arranging their whole social existence, which are very closely geared to these forms. They’re not especially aware of this. Linearity, though, is not characteristic of radio or television or movies. And so we have been subjected to tremendous new forces, new influences which have broken up the older habits acquired from the print world.
“The Communications Revolution,” a conversation with Gilbert Seldes and Keith Tyler at Ohio State University (1960), in McLuhan Speaks transcript
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Wake Them Up!
It needs to be understood that only short discontinuous shots of such a work as Joyce's are possible. Linear or continuous perspectives of analogical structures are only the result of radical distortion, and the craving for “simple explanations” is the yearning for univocity.
“James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial” Thought: Fordham University Quarterly, Vol. 28, No 1, (1953), in The Interior Landscape (1969), pp 36-37
Blake’s view was that [quoting Northrop Frye] “history as linear time is the great apocrypha or mystery which has to be ‘rejected’ since “the whole of human life is seen and understood as a single mental form.” (p. 340) The linear view of history began with Petrarch and Leonardo da Vinci and ended with Gibbon and Hume. So obsessive a metaphor as that of linear perspective is important enough to deserve some explanation, especially since we are now deep in the process of extricating ourselves from it.
“Inside Blake and Hollywood”, in Sewanee Review, Vol.55, No.4, October, (1947),p 710; reprinted in McLuhan Unbound (2003), p 6
Year: 1947
Chapters:
Blake, William | Perspective, Point of View
The Newtonian God—the God who made a clock-like universe, wound it, and withdrew—died a long time ago. This is what Nietzsche meant, and this is the God who is being observed. . . Anyone who is looking around for a simulated icon of the deity in Newtonian guise might well be disappointed. The phrase "God is dead" applies aptly, correctly, validly to the Newtonian universe which is dead. The groundrule of that universe, upon which so much of our Western world is built, has dissolved.
The Medium Is the Massage (1967), p 146
Year: 1967
The nineteenth century was the old machine age of fragmentation, literacy, and specialism, the one that the liberal mind has never got beyond. It's never studied the later environment.
“Open-Mind Surgery,” Fordham lecture (1967) in Understanding Me (2003), pp 151-152
Year: 1967
Our mechanical technologies for extending and separating the functions of our physical beings have brought us near to a state of disintegration by putting us out of touch with ourselves.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 108
Year: 1964
Visual man, paradoxically, is detached, but he always has an aim or a goal. He finds it natural to isolate a special point on the horizon where he is heading, whether in travel or in career. He is en route, striving to attain. But under the conditions of the new electric service environment—which is not visual—you cannot have distant goals to aim at because you're already there. It doesn't matter which electric medium you select—you're there when you turn it on. And what can you do about this living at the speed of light? If you can't have goals, you can play roles. This is where the "put-on" becomes a new way of life like the international motley of hair and costume worn by the young.
“Technology and the Human Dimension”: Marshall McLuhan with Louis Forsdale, in MM: The Man and His Message (1989), p 15
Year: 1989
Most people find it difficult to understand purely verbal concepts. They suspect the ear; they don’t trust it. In general we feel more secure when things are visible, when we can “see for ourselves.” We admonish children, for instance, to “believe only half of what they see, and nothing of what they hear.” All kinds of “shorthand systems of notation have been developed to help us see what we hear.
The Medium Is the Massage with Quentin Fiore (1967), p 117
Year: 1967
We employ visual and spatial metaphors for a great many everyday expressions. We insist on employing visual metaphors even when we refer to purely psychological states, such as tendency and duration. For instance, we say thereafter when we really mean thenafter, always when we mean at all times. We are so visually biased that we call our wisest men visionaries, or seers!
The Medium Is the Massage with Quentin Fiore (1967), p 117
Year: 1967
When information moves at electric speeds, the world of trends and rumors becomes the “real” world.
“Living at the Speed of Light” (1979), published in part in Macleans magazine, January 7, (1980); this line excise from the published version, found in the typescript, on p10
Year: 1979
Chapters:
Anticipating Change | Gossip and Rumors
Just because all the king’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again, it doesn’t follow that electromagnetic automation couldn’t have put Humpty Dumpty back together. The integral and unified egg had no business sitting on a wall, anyway. Walls are made of uniformly fragmented bricks that arise with specialisms and bureaucracies. They are the deadly enemies of integral beings like eggs. Humpty Dumpty met the challenge of the wall with a spectacular collapse.
“Humpty Dumpty, Automation, and TV” [University of Toronto] Varsity Graduate, Vo;ume 10, Number 4, Summer, 1963, p 25
Year: 1963
Chapters:
McLuhanisms & Zingers | Specialism
In the electronic era, we wear all mankind as our skin
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p x
Year: 1964
In other words, we have confused reason with literacy, and rationalism with a single technology.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 15
Year: 1964
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
[The industrial age] split class from class, job from job, profession from profession, work from play; divorced the self from the reality and joy of the present moment; fragmented the senses from the emotions, from the intellect; and, perhaps most importantly of all, created highly specialized and standardized males and female.
“The Future of Sex” with George Leonard (1967), in On the Nature of Media (20116), p 138
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Mechanization
Everybody has a right to protect his own ignorance. That is how specialists are made. A specialist is a person who has organized his ignorance to a very high degree.
“The Hardware-Software Mergers: How Successful Have They Been?” Speech within a Panel (date andfull context unclear) later published in the Proceedings of the Conference at the Center for Continuing Education, University of Chicago (1969). Transcript, p 4
Year: 1969
Sex is dead because sex was specialist. Any anthropologist will tell you that sex is not a special subject. It cannot be separated from total complex of society. Any society that pretends it can separate sex from other things is in trouble. The mini skirt is there to indicate that the end is in sight.
“The Hardware-Software Mergers: How Successful Have They Been?” Speech within a Panel (date andfull context unclear) later published in the Proceedings of the Conference at the Center for Continuing Education, University of Chicago (1969). Transcript, p 5
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Specialism
Hardware in my context is the fragmentation of processes in the interest of dealing systematically with one thing at a time, one subject at a time, one aspect at a time. That is no longer possible at electric speeds.
“The Hardware-Software Mergers: How Successful Have They Been?” Speech at the conference, Reappraisal of the Educational Technology Industry, University of Chicago, Novemer 16-18, 1969. Transcript, p 8
Year: 1969
The great thing about civilized values is they don’t involve a man. They leave him detached and uninvolved. Electric circuitry, starting a century or so ago, began to involve Western man as if he were an oriental. The West has gone profoundly oriental in the past century, has become much more involved in the process of life, and consciousness and unconsciousness, and the fact that it has upgraded Eastern values and downgraded Western values is entirely our doing.
TV Interview with Eric F. Goldman, “The Open Mind,” WNBC-TV, 1966. Transcript, p 21
Year: 1966
The typographic logic created the outsider, the alienated man, as the type of integral, that is, intuitive and irrational, man.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 241
Year: 1962