A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
Β©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Viewing chapter Masks (20 quotes)
What could be more tribal than that? When Dawn and Rock rock their faces are like masks…showing no emotion or pleasure. The solid tribal mask…the beat whose gaze is inward. Rock and roll is ritualistic, like an African tribal dance or a court gavotte.
The Teenager and The Media, Explorations for CBC May 18th, (1960) Printed as Exhibit 2--Television Script, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p xxxi
Quote #3671
Year: 1960
Back to the primitive mask, so that we have perhaps made some indication why these strangely sorted objects here-the mask and the television set have some congruity after all.
The Gutenberg Galaxy voyage between two worlds, Printed as Exhibit 3- Transcript from kinescope, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p Ii- Iii
Quote #3672
Year: 1960
The fact that the mask is sculptural, and I would believe or state that the TV image is also sculptural.
The Gutenberg Galaxy voyage between two worlds, Printed as Exhibit 3- Transcript from kinescope, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p xxxviii
Quote #3673
Year: 1960
The mask, like the sideshow freak, is not so much pictorial as participatory in its sensory appeal.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 185
Quote #3674
Year: 1968
Good taste is the expression of a colossal incompetence. It is the β€œputting on" of the genteel audience as a mask or net by which to capture ambient snob appeal.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 185
Quote #3675
Year: 1968
The stars are distinct individuals wearing human masks.
The Mechanical Bride, 1951, p 56
Quote #3676
Year: 1951
….when the celebrant [priest at Mass] turns to the audience he is putting them on as his corporate dignity or mask just as when he turns to the altar he is putting on the divine mask of supernatural power.
β€œSome Further Comments on Liturgy and Media”, in The Critic, Vol.31, No. 4, March - April (1973), p 70, reprinted in The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion (1999), p 135
Quote #3677
Year: 1973

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”
Mask wearer as role player wears the audience, manifesting human victimization by social forces.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 185
Quote #3678
Year: 1968
Yes, everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light, it's called being masked man, by the way, one of the big marks of the loss of identity is nostalgia and so, revivals on all hands in every phase of life today, revivals of clothing, of dances, of music, of shows, of everything. We live by the revival, it tells us who we are or where.
Mike McManus television interview, TVO, 1977, β€œViolence as a Quest for Identity”, transcript 04:42 ff
Quote #3679
Year: 1977
Chapters: Audience, Public, Mass | Identity | Speedups
On color TV any Negro is the superior of any white man. His corporate mask, integral and iconic, is suited to the iconoscope and dissolves the adjacent white image into insignificance.
β€œReview of P.E. Trudeau’s Federalism And the French Canadians”, in New York Times, November 17, 1968, p BR 36
Quote #3680
Year: 1968
The face of the [Wurlitzer] machine, with its garish cascade of lights, is like the phosphorescent mask of a tribal witch doctor.
The Mechanical Bride (1951), p 85
Quote #3681
Year: 1951
Charles Chaplin assembled a mask made up of bookkeeper, music hall entertainer, gallant and romantic searcher, then with genius added a touch of Pavlova… His footwork he acquired from the Ballet Russe. This touch transformed all the other components of his image, creating an overall effect of artistic spirituality and lent great power to the crass everyday features of his mask. None of the components in his mask correspond to anything that was the private C. Chaplin. Rather he chose carefully…just those items which gave him maximum corporate appeal.
β€œPublic and Private Sectors” (1964), pp 5-6
Quote #3682
Year: 1964
Chapters: After Language | Corporate | Putting On
The verbal equivalent of the mask is rhythm and measure.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 183
Quote #3683
Year: 1968
Chapter: Language
The small demi-mask worn by the participant in a masquerade is a "put on" of the group.
β€œInternational Motley and Religious Costume” (1972), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 75
Quote #3684
Year: 1972
The programming of computers calls for levels of human awareness about media and ourselves such as we do not yet possess.
"The Dare and Feeding of Communication Innovation", Conference on 8mm Sound Film and Education, Dinner Speech, November 8, 1961, Teachers College, Columbia University, p 4
Quote #3685
Year: 1961
Chapters: Advice | Computer | He’s Doubtful | Warnings
As the masks of entire cultures are brought into play we may discover again what it means to β€œlose face” or identity itself.
β€œRoles, Masks and Performances” (1971), in McLuhan Unbound (2017), pp 5-6
Quote #3686
Year: 1971
Poor old Richard Nixon hasn’t got a chance. He has no mask. He just has his bare face hanging out, just private Dickie Nixon. The public are dying to see themselves there. They don’t want to see Nixon; they want him to put them on. If he would even grow sideburns, if he would do anything, they would be transformed in their attitude to Nixon.
β€œTable Talk of MM” (1971), in MACLEAN'S (June 1971), p 45
Quote #3687
Year: 1971
Chapters: Politics and Government | Television
Again, as in [W.B. Yeats’s] Autobiographies: β€œI think that all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other self: that all joyous or creative life is a rebirth as something not oneself…”
β€œErasmus: Man and Masks” (1971), in Erasmus in English (1971), p 8
Quote #3688
Year: 1971
Chapter: Yeats, W.B.
Everybody in a crowd is a nobody; the crowd is mask.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 146
Quote #3689
Year: 1988
Chapters: Audience, Public, Mass | McLuhanisms & Zingers
[During the Renaissance] There was [during the Renaissance] a continuous tradition of persona or mask for the author as performer rather than reporter or spectator, which made the sixteenth-century reader at home in many mediaeval roles. As an author, Erasmus could have imaged himself as a schoolmaster, or as an orator, or a court preacher. He could address all of these publics simultaneously since there were no specialist and stratified reading publics in our sense.
β€œErasmus: Man and Masks” (1971), in Erasmus in English (1971), p 10
Quote #3690
Year: 1971
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