A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Viewing chapter Innovation (21 quotes)
For a decade or more radio executives refused to broadcast because it was alien to the nature of "wire-less" to diffuse. The radio hams forced the hand of executives to become broadcasters.
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Quote #3043
Chapter: Law of Implementation
We put on our technology as evolutionary clothing.
Quoted in W. T. Gordon, Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding (1997), p 265
Quote #3044
Year: 1997
Chapters: Evolution | Extension Theory | McLuhanisms & Zingers
Every massive technological innovation creates new environments, that destroy national and corporate images.
Culture Is Our Business (1970), p 66
Quote #3045
Year: 1970
The artist makes new perception that changes all the social ground rules.
The inventor creates products and processes that transform environments.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1973, p 98
Quote #3046
Year: 1973
Take the stirrup. So simple a thing as a stirrup brought massive social change. The stirrup was an extension of the foot to make it strong enough to carry armor. With an army in armor, someone had to pay for the armor and the people were taxed.
Quoted from an interview in “The McLuhan Galaxy” by Kay Kritzwiser, Globe and Mail, January 4, 1964, p 9
Quote #3047
Year: 1964
Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 5
Quote #3048
Year: 1962
[We are stuck in]…an age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 202
Quote #3049
Year: 1970
Chapters: Law of Implementation | Rear View Mirror

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.”
Innovation is obsolete. So is obsolescence, as information speed-up transforms man and his world into art form.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 297
Quote #3050
Year: 1972
Chapter: LOM 2 - Obsolesce
Air conditioning in the southern U.S. has revolutionized its society. It’s turned every southern[er] into a Yankee in 15 years.
“The Undiluted Wisdom of Marshall McLuhan,” Montreal Gazette, May 16, 1975
Quote #3051
Year: 1975
Indeed, “date-line” became a basic new concept, both of information and form. The idea of “up-dating” ideas, perceptions, style of prose and dress, and management became mandatory. Instant news had to be written in the inverted pyramid form with the main story in the first sentence so that editors could cut the stories anywhere to fit them into their mosaic. The key point to notice is that no more connections among the news items were sought or missed. The resonant interval took the place of the logical connection, and people became obsessed with the need for “keeping in touch.”
“Predicting 1983 and the Fourth World,” in Man and the Future of Organizations, Franklin Foundation Lecture Series, Volume 5, 1975, p 17
Quote #3052
Year: 1983
Chapter: Interval
Innovations paradoxically support the old system instead of wiping it out…
“The Social Impact of the Computer” (1979), typescript of a speech delivered in Europe early 1979, p 4
Quote #3053
Year: 1979
All invention is a form of bodily fission with the ensuing chain reactions in the body and in the environment.
Letter to Melvin Kranzberg, Editor, Journal of Culture and Technology, July 10, 1973
Quote #3054
Year: 1973
Chapters: Dropout | Extension Theory | Living Unity | Retribalizing | Tools We Shape, Reshape Us
You would never find out anything about automation by looking what is has been asked to do, card catalogues and such... You would find out what automation was by checking the effects of automation on the outlook of people, on their relation to work organization and decision making...
Interview by Eric F. Goldman for "The Open Mind," WNBC Television, March 1966 , p 10 of transcript
Quote #3055
Year: 1966
Chapters: Media Study | Pattern Recognition
As long as we adopt the Narcisses attitude of regarding the extensions of our own bodies as really out there and really independent of us, we will meet all technological challenge with the same sort of banana-skin pirouette and collapse.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 73 [may be Signet – confirm]
Quote #3056
Year: 1964
In our time we are familiar with the situation by which we try to prop up older structures withy new technologies. The motor car creates traffic congestion which requires a “police state” to operate it. Any bureaucracy pushed to new speeds up telex and telephones electric media becomes a police state. This is another way of viewing the educational institutions of the present. All the older methods of organizing and transmitting data are being used to push them to speeds which they cannot sustain, and to which neither student nor teacher can relate his needs and functions.
“Education and the New Media”, March 25, (1970), Televised in France, Le Monde Diplomatique, April 29, (1970), p 6-7
Quote #3057
Year: 1970
Electricity was first used for power, not for signals, that is, for the old job, not the new - same for automation.
“LOG for Chantacler,” n.d. typescript, written as a marginal handwritten note
Quote #3058
Xerox is behaving in the usual rear-view style, buying up old publishing companies....
They're trying to buy markets, not books. What a bunch!
“Like Yoga, Not Like the Movies,” Forbes, March 15, 1967, p 40
Quote #3059
Year: 1967
Chapter: Xerography
Our typical response to a disrupting new technology is to recreate the old environment instead of heeding the opportunities of the new environment.
“Environment and Anti-Environment” (1966), p 44
Quote #3060
Year: 1966
The potential of any technology is always dissipated by its users' involvement in its predecessors.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 266
Quote #3061
Year: 1968
Another approach to cliché is to point out that the more deeply people participate in a culture, the less the motive for innovation.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 58
Quote #3062
Year: 1970
Chapters: Change | Cliché and Archetype | Tribal Societies
New means create new ends as new services create new discomforts.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson, 1970, opening page of paperback edition
Quote #3063
Year: 1970
Chapter: McLuhanisms & Zingers
© The Estate of Marshall McLuhan