A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
Β©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Viewing chapter Graphic Communication (18 quotes)
The Graphic Revolution, by which a private image can be showered on the world overnight, scrambles and confuses all pre-electric categories of fame and greatness. But it also increases the demand for big names and big images. Let us keep in mind that the new reality is in the image and not behind it.
Marshall McLuhan
β€œThe Electronic Age – The Age of Implosion” (1962), p 196
Quote #2520
Year: 1962
Chapter: Graphic Communication
The language of visual form is, therefore, one which lies to hand as an unused Esperanto at everybody’s command.
β€œThe Media Fit the Battle of Jericho” in Explorations 6 (1956), in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 300
Quote #2521
Year: 1956
Chapters: After Language | Cartoons, Comics | Iconic
The Chinese never had an alphabet, but their ideograms are pictorial translations of human gestures and relationships. As our press has become more pictorial our whole culture has become more sympathetic to Chinese art and expression. So that the very features of our culture which have intruded disruptively into the East have also brought us a basis for approaching their kind of communication.Β Β 
β€œNew Media and Political Change”, in International Journal, Vol.7, No. 3, Summer (1952) p 192Β 
Quote #2522
Year: 1952
Chapters: After Language | Body Language | China, Chinese
As our original book technology has been succeeded by movie and television we have lost book literacy without acquiring visual literacy. So now the principle of natural selection unexpectedly favors the Chinese and Japanese, for example; their pictorial mode of writing, once a great disadvantage in relation to the abstract culture of print, now favors them in a world of visual communication.
β€œA Historical Guide to the Media” (1955), p 104
Quote #2523
Year: 1955
Chapters: Iconic | Media Literacy
Why not study the comic strips as moral landscapes expressing local impulse and motive?
The Mechanical Bride, (1951), p 64
Quote #2524
Year: 1951
Chapter: Cartoons, Comics
The comic book for example has been seen as a degenerate literary form instead of as a nascent pictorial and dramatic form which has sprung from the new stress on visual-auditory communication in the magazines, the radio and television. The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.
Letter to Harold Adams Innis, March 14, 1951, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 222
Quote #2525
Year: 1951
Chapter: Cartoons, Comics
…comic strips and comic books are the shock troops of a culture which has been shredded and stretched and spun by accelerated technological change.
β€œThe Comics and Culture” (1953) in On the Nature of Media (2016)
Quote #2526
Year: 1953
Chapter: Cartoons, Comics
For in the beginning was the gesture… And the comic strip is the world of gesture, as the author of Mandrake the Magician knows very well.
β€œThe Comics and Culture” (1953), in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 32
Quote #2527
Year: 1953
Chapters: Body Language | Cartoons, Comics

Drawn to McLuhan #2

Two-panel comic illustration of a boxing match: a humanoid figure made of tumbling alphabet letters wearing "BRECE" shorts faces off against a muscular boxer with a smartphone for a head, under a "LITERACY VS ELECTRONIC" ring sign; in the second panel the smartphone boxer knocks the letter-man apart with a "K.O." punch.
β€œIt may even prove to be the case that the entire tradition of phonetic writing, which is co-extensive with our Western world and the Graeco-Roman tradition, cannot sustain the electronic impact.”
Illustrated period scene of a man in early-1900s suit and cap stepping into a Ford Model T outside the "Biograph Theatre" marquee advertising "The Artful Dodger," with a thought bubble above showing rows of parked cars at an outdoor movie screening.
β€œNew means create new goals.”
Illustrated interior of a rustic coffee shop with several patrons seated separately, each connected by small thought-bubble trails to one large shared blank thought bubble overhead, suggesting wordless, intuitive communication.
β€œThe future of language presents the possibility of a world without words, a wordless, intuitive world, like a technological extension of the action of consciousness.”
Illustration set in a lush jungle showing a feather-adorned Indigenous tribesman facing a translucent glowing green humanoid figure whose body is composed of streaming binary code.
β€œThe new electronic man and pre-literate man see eye to eye.”
Stylized line-art illustration of an elevated highway with a bright yellow central lane sweeping up into a sharp architectural peak, flanked by a modern city skyline of glass skyscrapers.
β€œThe road is our major architectural form.”
Illustration of a cluttered living room where a mother holds a baby on a couch surrounded by several children, most staring blankly at an unseen glowing television screen while a teenager scrolls a phone.
β€œWe are not the true parents of our children.”
Illustrated lineup of warriors and soldiers spanning history left to right β€” an Indigenous fighter, Roman legionaries, a medieval knight, WWI and modern soldiers, a futuristic armored figure, and an astronaut on the moon β€” set against a backdrop of fire, smoke, and space.
β€œWe put on our technology as evolutionary clothing.”
Comic-style illustration of a robed orator gesturing dramatically from a pedestal, his speech rendered as a jumbled speech bubble of scrambled Greek letters, while an assistant arranges the same letters into ordered puzzle pieces spelling Greek words like "ΑΑΕ΀Η" and "Ξ”Ξ™ΞšΞ‘Ξ™ΞŸΞ£Ξ₯ΝΗ" on a scroll.
β€œWriting is the spatialization of thought.”
The YouTube logo: a red rounded rectangle with a white play-button triangle beside the black "YouTube" wordmark on a black background.
[With electronic media, we are building] β€œβ€¦a new tribal encyclopedia of auditory incantation”
…such gestures create new kinds of metaphor by bringing together unlike and unlikely situations which suddenly illuminate one another, creating a kind of mental sneeze.
β€œThe Comics and Culture”, in Saturday Night, Feb 23 1953, p 19
Quote #2528
Year: 1953
Chapter: Cartoons, Comics
[Comics] may eventually be seen as that army of mercenaries which upheld the scheme of things for pay when all the responsible, disinterested and cultivated folk had fled.
β€œThe Comics and Culture”, in Saturday Night, February 23, 1953, p 19
Quote #2529
Year: 1953
Chapter: Cartoons, Comics
The computer has no need for verbal programming. Gestures, both macroscopic and microscopic, can readily substitute for language.
β€œThe Man Who Came to Listen” with Barrington Nevitt, In Peter Drucker’s Contributions to Business Enterprise, Eds., T. H. Bonaparte and J. E. Flaherty (New York: New York University Press, 1970), p 54
Quote #2530
Year: 1970
Language, as we know, profoundly influences culture; ’’non-verbal” and non-linear language and expressive behavior has an influence incalculably more dynamic.
Letter to the Editor, Time magazine, July 9, 1964 (LAC)
Quote #2531
Year: 1964
One's vernacular is best seen and felt through another tongue. And for us, at least, society is only appreciated by comparing and contrasting it with others. Pictorial and other experience today is filled with metaphors from all the cultures of the globe. Whereas the written vernaculars have always locked men up within their own cultural monad, the language of technological man, while drawing on all the cultures of the world, will necessarily prefer those media which are least national. The language of visual form is, therefore, one which lies to hand as an unused Esperanto at everybody's command. The language of vision has already been adopted in the pictograms of scientific formula and logistics. These ideograms transcend national barriers as easily as Chaplin or Disney and would seem to have no rivals as the cultural base for cosmic man.
β€œCulture without Literacy”, in Explorations #1, December (1953), p 127 reprinted in Essential McLuhan, (1995), p 312, additional reprint in Media Research Technology, Art and Communication (1997), p 138, and McLuhan Unbound #6, (2017)
Quote #2532
Year: 1953
Well before Gutenberg's development of printing from movable types, a great deal of printing on paper by woodcut had been done. Perhaps the most popular form of this kind of block printing of text and image had been in the form of the Biblia Pauperum, or Bibles of the Poor. Printers in this woodcut sense preceded typographic printers, though by just how long a period it is not easy to establish, because these cheap and popular prints, despised by the learned, were not preserved any more than are the comic books of today. The great law of bibliography comes into play in this matter of the printing that precedes Gutenberg: "The more there were, the fewer there are." It applies to many items besides printed matterβ€”to the postage stamp and to the early forms of radio receiving sets.
Understanding Media, (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 159
Quote #2533
Year: 1964
It is relevant to consider that the old prints and woodcuts, comic strip and comic book, provide very little data about any particular moment in time, or aspect in space, of an object. The viewer, or reader, is compelled to participate in completing and interpreting the few hints provided by the bounding lines.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 160
Quote #2534
Year: 1964
Since the advent of TV, the comic book has gone into a decline. It is, perhaps, obvious enough that if a cool medium involves the viewer a great deal, a hot medium will not. It may contradict popular ideas to say that typography as a hot medium involves the reader much less than did manuscript, or to point out that the comic book and TV as cool media involve the user, as maker and participant, a great deal.
Understanding Media, (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 161
Quote #2535
Year: 1964
John Donne and George Herbert were engaged in transferring to the new printed page of the seventeenth century many of the effects which had previously been popular in the pictorial world of the later Middle Ages. For them print had made the visual arts recessive and quaint. In this century, while the vogue for metaphysical poetry had come and gone, the sudden predominance of he graphic arts has made print recessive. So a parallel but reverse combination of visual media corresponded for a few years between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries.
β€œA Historical Approach to the Media” (1955), p 105
Quote #2536
Year: 1955
Philip Marchand:
[In a proposal McLuhan made to the editors of Time and Life magazine] β€œβ€¦.that they bring the articles in Life magazine up to the full dynamic integration of image and text as the advertisements, with the β€œsame iconic inclusiveness and integrity of the image.”
Marshall McLuhan The Medium and the Messenger (1989), p 156
Quote #2537
Year: 1989
Chapter: Iconic
W.T. Gordon:
β€œWhat appealed to McLuhan about Dada was the way it breached the aesthetic categories of the verbal and the visual, combining them in such a way as to produce a critique of representational norms. Given McLuhan’s claim that media tended to produce artificial environments and the artists produced count-environments as a way of critiquing them, the artist took a high profile role in his theory of media.
Introduction to β€œCulture and Technology” (1966), in the anthology On the Nature of Media (2016) , p 84
Quote #2538
Year: 1966
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