A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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[His favorite verse of poetry describing his career:]
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea
Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Lyrical Ballads (1798)
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
[At age 18]
Asked. What do you intend to do when you grow up, Mr. McLuhan?
Me. As Dr. Johnson, when at the age of 3 months, once answered Joseph Addison, “Outside of being a great and influential man, sir, I have not the faintest idea.” I too with him can say I have not the faintest idea.
Diary entry, January 10, 1930
Year: 1930
[At age 18] Dr. Hamilton’s lecture [on psychic research] sure started me thinking. It was a startling evaluation of what the future may contain. He dealt with Psychic power over objects as well as ectoplasm + telekinesis. I am glad Bill was not there. He would have been all upset mentally. I feel that for one as susceptible + imaginative as myself such a fascinating study must be avoided as one would avoid a snake.
Diary entry, January 31, 1930)
Year: 1930
[At age 18] I like to argue against fact (for fun). It is quite easy to make a strong case against anyone, especially if you know the whole case (for good and against bad) while your opponent knows only one side, no matter how well.
Diary entry, February 8, 1930
Year: 1930
[At age 18] Went over to Bill Kilblewaites at 9 P.M. Took over Gilbert + Sullivan records. When I got off the car I saw a girl at the corner of the street, about 200 ft away. Immediately Evelyn Kub came to my mind but I thot [sic] that would be out of the question. I passed her and she glanced curiously at me. 10 ft further I knew it was she. My hunches rarely fail although I usually reason them away, for which I am always sorry...
Diary entry, March 13, 1930
Year: 1930
[At age 18] Professor Wright mentioned one thing in his lecture, the significance of which he was not himself fully aware. He said esthetic enjoyment of the great masters is empathetical emotion that can be felt only by those who had studied the sphere. Hard work and often specialized hard work must precede the reward.
Diary entry, March 24, 1930
Year: 1930
[At age 18] My course as it now lies is to be the best that I can be, to follow my noblest inclinations and if fame comes, to regard I as the least of my possessions.
Diary entry, June 1, (1930)
Year: 1930
[At age 18] I earnestly pray that I shall have a job where I can spend a lot of time laughing.
Diary entry, June 7, (1930)
Year: 1930
Drawn to McLuhan #12
“The big discoveries are not being made in New York, you know, or any other part of the world, except right here in Toronto!”
Letter to Pete Buckner, September 20, 1971 (LAC)
[At age 19] His life had been stranger than the dreams of other people.
Marginal notation quoted atop a page in his diary of 1931
Year: 1931
[At age 19] I must, must, must attain worldly success to a real degree. It seems inconsistent I know to wish for such things and yet have your trust in God. However, I believe that He meant us all to achieve as much happiness on this earth as we could. My temperament could never be happy, nor give happiness to those who must one day be dependent on me and my friends, if abject poverty were to be my lot. It has been the fate of both sides of the family.
Diary entry, January 14 ,(1931)
Year: 1931
[At age 19] I envy his [Macauley’s] industry, his great capacity to love people, books, and whatever was solid and healthy. Next to being great oneself it would be most satisfying to have a son that threaded his way with ease among the perilous peaks of fame, or a brother, or a close friend.
Diary entry, March 27, (1931)
Year: 1931
[after seeing a performance of G.B. Shaw’s “Pygmalion”]. I think that [George Bernard] Shaw deserves one of the highest places among English dramatists. As far as comparing him with that paragon of mortals, the very quintessence of human clay, why it is of course absurd. Shaw has studied life and reduced his observations to pithy and valuable aphorisms. Shakespeare held up the mirror to life itself. Nothing further need be said in comparison. The difference is as great as between sublime genius and clever brilliance. I shall certainly get thru Shaw at the first opportunity.
Letter to his mother, Elsie Hall McLuhan, February 19, (1933), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 9
Year: 1933
[Of George Meredith, early on, words that would later would prove true of himself ]
He is so wholly sui generis that neglect of him involves neglect of nothing else, implies no deficiency of taste, no literary limitation. He cannot be placed.
George Meredith as a Poet and Dramatic Novelist, from the Introduction of McLuhan’s M.A. thesis at the University of Manitoba, 1934,
Year: 1934
[To his mother while he was converting to Catholicism]
Dear Mother:
Your alarm about my “religion-hunting” traits which you assume to be inherited from the most questionable part of my ancestry [her father, Henry Seldon Hall], is largely unfounded. Letters are of course fatal things when it comes to imparting a situation with its shades of emphasis. I need scarcely point out that religious enthusiasm (in which I am lamentably weak) has rarely directed the erratic and leaping feet of the inebriated one along the slow and arduous path that leads from a meeting-house to the Church – I mean the Catholic and Universal Church, the visible body of Christ. Now religion-hunting even in its worst phases, is yet a testimony to the greatest fact about man, namely, that he is a creature and an image, and not sufficient unto himself. It is the whole bias of the mind that it seek Truth, and of the soul which inspires our very life, that it seek that which gave it. The great difficulty about Truth is that it is not simple except to those who can attain to see it whole. The very definition of an enthusiast is that he has seized a truth which he cannot and would not, if he could, relate to other truths of life. He is invariably unsympathetic and lacking in humanity. I have some elements of enthusiasm which have been more than occupied in hero-worship – e.g., Macaulay and Chesterton. Them days is gone forever, but I shall always think that my selection of heroes was fortunate. Both were calculated to suppress any tendency I had towards harping on one truth at a time. You may be sure that I shall take no inconsiderable step about entering the Roman Communion – I shall probably take some years, because I am completely uneducated for the step. I am not even serious enough to be “contemptuous” of the probable effect on my worldly prospects. I believe they would not be altered save for small colleges originally of religious origin – perhaps Acadia, certainly Wesley. The Provincial U’.s would be indifferent; religion being at such an ebb in our land at present as to be considered a negligible factor. However, I will not be a Catholic when I come to apply for posts. And I am waiting advice from Wheeler at present regarding what U.’s in Canada and U.S.A. to apply to, and how to apply to them. I therefore implore you to put aside your apprehensions. Religion is a personal matter and I shall not be visibly altered – tho I could wish for countless improvements – by such a change.
Letter to Elsie Hall McLuhan, September 5, (1935), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 72
Year: 1935
Catholic religion is the only religion – all sects are derivative. Buddhism and similar Oriental philosophies and mythologies are not religions in any sense. They have no Covenants and no Sacraments and no Theology. The very notion of “comparative” Religion is ridiculous. Now, the Catholic religion, as you may be able to check in your own experience of it, is alone in blessing and employing all those merely human faculties which produce games and philosophy, and poetry and music and mirth and fellowship with a very fleshly basis. It alone makes terms with what our sects have hated and called by ugly names – e.g., “carnal” which is delightfully near to “charnel”. The Catholic Church does not despise or wantonly mortify those members and faculties which Christ deigned to assume. They are henceforth holy and blessed.
Letter to Elsie Hall McLuhan, September ,5 (1935), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) pp 72- 73
Year: 1935
Catholic culture produced Chaucer and his merry story-telling Canterbury Pilgrims. Licentious enthusiasm produced the lonely despair of Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress – what a different sort of pilgrim! Catholic culture produced Don Quixote and St. Francis and Rabelais. What I wish to emphasize about there is their varied and rich-hearted humanity. I need scarcely indicate that everything that is especially hateful and devilish and inhuman about the conditions and strain of modern industrial society is not only Protestant in origin but it is their boast (!) to have originated it. You may know a thing by its fruit if you are silly enough or ignorant enough to wait that long. I find the fruits and the theory of our sects very bitter. Had I not encountered Chesterton, I would have remained Agnostic for many years at least. Chesterton did not convince me of Religious Truth, but he prevented my despair from becoming a habit or hardening into misanthropy. He opened my eyes to European culture and encouraged me to know it more closely. He taught me the reasons for all that [which] in me was simply blind anger and misery. He went through it himself; but since he lived where much Catholic culture remained and since he had genius, he got through it quicker.
Letter to his mother September 5, (1935), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 73
Year: 1935
Canadians are all a very humble bunch. They take it for granted that everything they do must be second rate. [In publishing Explorations] Carpenter and I just blithely assumed that, since nearly everything in the world is second rate at best, there was no reason why we couldn’t do something that was first rate right here.
Quoted in Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan The Medium and the Messenger: a Biography (1989), p 119
Year: 1989
When the interrelatedness of many things is made plain, then the mind is freed from any watchful fretting over any of them.
Undated letter to Felix Giovanelli, circa (1938-1939), quoted by W. Terrence Gordon in MM: Escape into Understanding (1997), p 139.
Year: 1938
My method is vertical rather than horizontal, so the scenery does not change but the texture does.
Letter to Harold Rosenberg, March 1. 1965, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 318
Year: 1965
Dear Frank:
Here's one to play on Sheed's own trumpet! A guy who turns in a fire alarm is not
Necessarily an arsonist! Marshall McLuhan has never said that the printed page has come to an end. McLuhan has said that the book is obsolescent. So is handwriting. But there is more handwriting done today than there was before Gutenberg. Obsolescence never meant the end of anything— it's just the beginning.
Letter to Frank Sheed, February 20, 1970, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 398
Year: 1970
I have never endorsed the events I have described, nor have I ever condemned any of the things I analysed. I am interested in understanding processes. Such are the opaquities and obliquities of "value" judgments that they have always a stood in the way of human understanding.
Letter to Frank Sheed, February 20, 1970, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 399
Year: 1970
I go my way with the assurance of a sleepwalker.
Letter to Harry Skornia, March 4, 1960 (LAC)
Year: 1960
It’s a nuisance having my books criticized. It’s like being caught with your fly open. It confuses my students. But I don’t think I’ve had more than half-a-dozen students who’ve read anything I’ve written. They’re not interested in my stuff and know very well that if they use it anywhere in their essays it’s going to be held against them. I warn them never to quote me.
“ The Table Talk of Marshall McLuhan”, Interview with Peter C.Newman in Maclean´s magazine, (June 1971), p 45
Year: 1971
Chapter:
Hostility to McLuhan
A great deal of valuable energy can be expended in building up moral defenses against one’s time.
From an undated 3 page typescript titled, “Autobiography”
I've always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened Interview with Tom Wolfe, TVOntario, August 1970
Year: 1970
I soon realized that recognizing the symptoms of change was not enough; one must understand the cause of change, for without comprehending causes, the social and psychic effects of new technology cannot be counter-acted or modified. But I recognized
also that one individual cannot accomplish these self-protective modifications; they must be the collective effort of society, because they affect all of society; the individual is helpless against the pervasiveness of environmental change: the new garbage—or message—induced by new technologies. Only the social organism, united and recognizing the challenge, can move to meet it.
Playboy interview, 1969, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1997, UK edition), 257
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Change
Unfortunately, no society in history has ever known enough about the forces that shape and transform it to take action to control and direct new technologies as they extend and transform man. But today, change proceeds so instantaneously through the new media that it may be possible to institute a global education program that will enable us to seize the reins of our destiny—but to do this we must first recognize the kind of therapy that’s needed for the effects of the new media. In such an effort, indignation against those who perceive the nature of those effects is no substitute for awareness
and insight.
Playboy interview, 1969, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1997, UK edition), 257-258
Year: 1969
Chapters:
Change | Mastering Technology
PLAYBOY: You’ve explained why you avoid approving or
disapproving of this revolution in your work, but you must have a private
opinion. What is it?
McLUHAN: I don’t like to tell people what I think is good or bad about the social and psychic changes caused by new media, but if you insist on pinning me down about my own subjective reactions as I observe the reprimitivization of our culture, I would have to say that I view such upheavals with total personal dislike and dissatisfaction. I do see the prospect of a rich and creative retribalized society—free of the fragmentation and alienation of the mechanical age—emerging from this traumatic period of culture clash; but I have nothing but distaste for the process of change. As a man molded within the literate Western tradition, I do not personally cheer the dissolution of that tradition through the electric involvement of all the senses: I don’t enjoy the destruction of neighborhoods by high-rises or revel in the pain of identity quest.
Playboy interview, 1969, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1997, UK edition), 258-259
Year: 1969
…all of my life has been devoted to teaching and cultivating literary values. When I published Gutenberg Galaxy I was entirely mystified about the response which assumed it to be an attack on the printed word.
Letter to Malcolm Muggeridge, September 29, 1974, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 507
Year: 1974
No one could be less enthusiastic about these radical changes than
myself. I am not, by temperament or conviction, a revolutionary
would prefer a stable, changeless environment of modest services
and human scale. TV and all the electric media are unraveling the
entire fabric of our society, and as a man who is forced by
circumstances to live within that society, I do not take delight in its
disintegration.
Playboy interview, 1969, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1997, UK edition), 258-259
Year: 1969
You see, I am not a crusader; I imagine I would be most happy living in a secure preliterate environment; I would never attempt to change my world, for better or worse. Thus I derive no joy from observing the traumatic effects of media on man, although I do obtain satisfaction from grasping their modes of operation. Such comprehension is inherently cool, since it is simultaneously involvement and detachment. This posture is essential in studying media. One must begin by becoming extraenvironmental, putting oneself beyond the battle in order to study and understand the configuration of forces. It’s vital to adopt a posture of arrogant superiority; instead of scurrying into a corner and wailing about what media are doing to us, one should charge straight ahead and kick them in the electrodes. They respond beautifully to such resolute treatment and soon become servants rather than masters. But without this detached involvement, I could never objectively observe media; it would be like an octopus grappling with the Empire State Building. So I employ the greatest boon of literate culture: the power of man to act without reaction—the sort of specialization by dissociation that has been the driving motive force behind Western civilization.
Playboy interview, 1969, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1997, UK edition), 258-259
Year: 1969
The Western world is being revolutionized by the electric media as rapidly as the East is being Westernized, and although the society that eventually emerges may be superior to our own, the process of change is agonizing. I must move through this pain-wracked transitional era as a scientist would move through a world of disease; once a surgeon becomes personally involved and disturbed about the condition of his patient, he loses the power to help that patient. Clinical detachment is not some kind of haughty pose I affect—nor does it reflect any lack of compassion on my part; it’s simply a survival strategy. The world we are living in is not one I would have created on my own drawing board, but it’s the one in which I must live, and in which the students I teach must live. If nothing else, I owe it to them to avoid the luxury of moral indignation or the troglodytic security of the ivory tower and to get down into the junk yard of environmental change and steam-shovel my way through to a comprehension of its contents and its lines of force—in order to understand how and why it is metamorphosing man.
Playboy interview, 1969, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1997, UK edition), p 259
Year: 1969
As someone committed to literature and the traditions o p f literacy, I began to study the new environment that imperiled literary values, and I soon realized that they could not be dismissed by moral outrage or pious indignation. Study showed that a totally new approach was required, both to save what deserved saving in our Western heritage and to help man adopt a new survival strategy. I adapted some of this new approach in The Mechanical Bride by attempting to immerse myself in the advertising media in order to apprehend their impact on man, but even there some of my old literate “point of view” bias crept in. The book, in any case, appeared just as television was making all its major points irrelevant.
Playboy interview, 1969, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1997, UK edition), 257
Year: 1969
The road to understanding media effects begins with arrogant superiority.
McLuhan Hot and Cool, 1967, p 284
Year: 1967
I don’t want to be in the position of a Hiroshima physicist extolling the potential of nuclear energy in the first days of August 1945.
Playboy interview, republished in Essential McLuhan (UK edition), 1997, p 255
Year: 1997
It’s a nuisance having my books criticized. It’s like being caught with your fly open. It confuses my students. But I don’t think I’ve had more than half-a-dozen students who’ve read anything I’ve written. They’re not interested in my stuff and know very well that if they use it anywhere in their essays it’s going to be held against them. I warn them never to quote me.
“ The Table Talk of Marshall McLuhan”, Interview with Peter C.Newman in Maclean´s magazine, (June 1971), p 45
Year: 1971
Chapter:
Hostility to McLuhan
I am not, by temperament or conviction, a revolutionary; I would prefer a stable, changeless environment of modest services and human scale.
Playboy interview, 1969, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1997), p 267
Year: 1969
Written at age 19:
Looking back I can say that my literary knowledge has been increased, my standards of real manhood raised, my standards of domestic affection set, my self-conceit dispelled, and this and much more as the result of a careful perusal of the faithful account of a great man’s [Thomas Babington Macaulay’s] life
Entry made on August 14 in his Diary of 1930
Year: 1930
A great deal of valuable energy can be expended in building up moral defenses against one’s time.
An undated 3 page typescript titled, “Autobiography”
There are people in the world who would kick a cocker spaniel out of sheer meanness but I have never heard of anyone depraved enough to give a pessimistic commencement address.
“McLuhan Dazzles Graduates”, 1969, p 27
Year: 1969
My object is to learn the grammar and general language of 20 major fields in order to help on an orchestra among the arts. cf. S.Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command [1948] as sample ofhow I should like to set up a school of literary studies. Basic modes ofcognition on this continent not linguistic but technological. Artistic experience comes to the young only via that channel. Must work with that at first. Present procedure is to slap an alien culture over the actual one. The real one is killed and the alien one is worn as a party mask. You and Eisenstein have shown me how to make use of Chinese ideogram to elicit the natural modes of American sensibility. But I've just begun. Feeling my way.
Letter to Ezra Pound, January 5, 1951, in Letters (1988), p 218
Year: 1951
Chapter:
Giedion, Sigfried
Some of my fellow academics are very hostile, but I sympathize with them. They’ve been asleep for 500 years and they don’t like anybody who comes along and stirs them up.
“The Lost Marshall McLuhan Tapes,” (Recovered 1972 interview) by Peter C. Newman, in Macleans, July 16, 2013
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Hostility to McLuhan
The President needs me. I don’t know what our President would do without me. Claude Bissel that is, the President of dear old Toronto University, not Iike the President of the United States, who by the way I do not like. Claude has asked me to give his advisory group of senior academics the benefit of my views on the changes in higher learning necessitated by the electric age. It pains me to think of the changes sweeping through our leather-patched, tweed-ridden, and chalk-dusty world of which this august body is totally oblivious. No matter, it is my duty to tell them what they do not know. In short they are obsolete. I wonder how they will take the news.
Letter to Claude Bissel, Jan 4, 1961, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 279
Year: 1961
Chapters:
Education | LOM 2 - Obsolesce
If only somebody would disagree with me I would feel more hope.
Letter to Ezra Pound, July 30, (1948), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 199
Year: 1948
Personally, I’m not tired or discouraged. So I am a cause of much annoyance and discomfort wherever I happen to be. But isolation is a poor strategy except for the mystic.
Letter to Dorothy Shakespeare Pound [wife of Ezra Pound], Late September (1948), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 205
Year: 1948
Conversation is, for me, something like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a game in which you play all sorts of nose-dives and air-tumbles.
Letter to Pete Buckner, October 28, 1971 (LAC), quoted in W.T. Gordon’s MM: Escape into Understanding, (1997), p 283
Year: 1971
Chapters:
Dialogue | Playfulness
Literature is the recognized storehouse of human values. The [literary] critic has the key to that storehouse.
“Delinquent Adults Behind the Super Comics” unpublished, undated typescript, circa (1949), p 1
Year: 1949
Chapter:
Literary Criticism
The word is now the cheapest and most universal drug.
Letter to Ezra Pound, June 22, (1951), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, (1987) p 227
Year: 1951
I am an intellectual thug who has been slowly accumulating a private arsenal with every intention of using it.
Letter to Ezra Pound, June 22, (1951), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, (1987) p 227
Year: 1951
I must move through this pain-wracked transitional era as a scientist would move through a world of disease; once a surgeon becomes personally involved and disturbed about the condition of his patient, he loses the power to help that patient.
Playboy Interview, 1969, in Essential McLuhan (1997, UK edition), p 267
Year: 1969
I should prefer to de-fuse this gigantic human bomb by starting a dialogue somewhere on the side-lines to distract the trigger-men or to needle the somnambulists. In London 1910 you faced various undesirable states of mind.
Letter to Ezra Pound, June 22, (1951), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, (1987), p 227
Year: 1951
This book reverses that process by providing typical visual imagery of our environment and dislocating it into meaning by inspection.
“Preface”, The Mechanical Bride, (1951), p vi
Year: 1951
My values are strongly centered in literacy, which I teach day and night.
“Violence as a Quest for Identity,” 1977, in Understanding Me (2003), p 272
Year: 1977
To win more and more attention for the best work it is necessary to demonstrate what constitutes the inevitably second-rate, third-rate, and so on.
The Mechanical Bride (1951), p 15
Year: 1951
We only want Tragedy if it can clench its side-muscles like hands on its belly and bring to the surface a laugh like a bomb.
Counterblast, original 10-page typescript, (1954), p vi
Year: 1954
Never hunt anything small.
Reported as a personal maxim by Eric McLuhan
Chapters:
McLuhanisms & Zingers | Writing
[With The Mechanical Bride] …I was attempting a defense of book culture against the new media. I can now see that I was trying to bring some of the critical awareness fostered by literary training to bear on the new media of sight and sound. My strategy was wrong, because my obsession with literary values blinded me too much that was actually happening for good and ill. What we have to defend today is not the values developed in any particular culture or by any one mode of communication. Modern technology presumes to attempt a total transformation of man and his environment. This calls in turn for an inspection and defense of all human values. And so far as merely human aid goes, the citadel of this defense must be located in analytical awareness of the nature of the creative process involved in human cognition.
“Sight, Sound and the Fury” in Commonweal, Vol. 60, No. 1, April 9, (1954), p 11
Year: 1954
For me it has always been an advantage to have direct contact with eminent men, if only because proof positive of their essential mediocrity spurs younger talent.
“Space, Time and Poetry” in Explorations 4, (1955), p 56
Year: 1955
[Of his own mental vitality] The game keeps springing up like crazy.
Quoted from undated letter to John Wain, circa late 1950s, in “The Incidental Thoughts of Marshall McLuhan”; In Wain’s Dear Shadows (1986), p 107
Year: 1950
[I] find most pop culture monstrous and sickening. I study it for my own survival.
Quoted in G. McCartney, “The Clue in McLuhan,” National Review, (1989), p 46
Year: 1989
I go my way with the assurance of a sleepwalker.
Letter to Harry Skornia, March 4, (1960) retrieved from LAC, Library Archives Canada
Year: 1960
The advantage of having a tightly woven thesis to present to you is that it can be used as a rug to be yanked violently from under my feet.
"Effects of the Improvements of Communication Media." The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 20, No. 4, December (1960), p 566
Year: 1960
The method of the twentieth century has been to use not a single but multiple models for experimental exploration – the technique of the suspended judgment.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 81
Year: 1962
[Said of H.A.Innis, equally true of himself]
Innis sacrificed point of view and prestige to his sense of the urgent need for insight and understanding.
The Gutenberg Galaxy : The Making of Typographic Man , (1962), p 216
Year: 1962
Dear Mr. Russel: As you might have suspected, I found your review most agreeable! Not that I am an anti-book person, or an anti-lineal thinker. If I have any normal and natural preferences, they are for the values of the literate world. In so far as print bias renders us helpless and ineffectual in the new electronic age, I am strongly inclined to cultivate the kinds of perception that are relevant to our state.
Letter to Robert Russel, June 15 (1964), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 302
Year: 1964
If I had the world’s ten best books on a desert island, I should be more strongly tempted to spend my time in shipbuilding rather than browsing the printed page.
Letter to Robert Russel, June 15 (1964) ,in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 302
Year: 1964
In fact, I hope very much to translate Understanding Media into a text book for school use. You see, the world of media is one in which the young are deeply versed. It is one that not only shapes their earliest perceptions, but which nourishes them as well, far beyond any nutriment received in the classroom. This area of experience, therefore, is one that cries out for clarification. The fact that literate adults in our world would have very simple-minded ideas about media does not prevent media from having very complex results on psyche and society.
Letter to Bascom St John, July 10, 1964, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 306
Year: 1964
I suggest that your writer "cool” off by re-reading McLuhan’s work while’ in a less Procrustean frame of attitude.
Letter to the Editor to the Editor of Time magazine, July 9, (1964) Spurred by their review of Understanding Media (LAC)
Year: 1964
[Understanding Media] explores the contours of our own extended beings in our technologies, seeking the principle of intelligibility in each of them.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 6
Year: 1964
I am in the position of Louis Pasteur telling doctors that their greatest enemy was quite invisible, and quite unrecognized by them. Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the "content" of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as "content." The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content. The "content" of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 18
Year: 1964
[To Harold Rosenberg, upon Rosenberg’s highly favorable review of Understanding Media in “Philosophy in a Pop Key” in the New Yorker]
One theme that you raise is that of my repetitiveness. This has always puzzled me since I am sure that I do not repeat. But it suddenly dawned on me that my basic method has always been that of drilling, as it were. My method is vertical rather than horizontal, so the scenery does not change but the texture does.
Letter to Harold Rosenberg, March 1, (1965), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, (1987), p 318
Year: 1965
In my youth I rejected it [the 20th century] as unfit for human habitation. Now I look at the 20th century as a new form.
“Marshall McLuhan, Prophet and Analyst of the Age of Instant Knowledge: Easing the Technological Burden of Western Man” Article by John Kettle, in Canada Month, September (1965), p 12
Year: 1965
Chapter:
Twentieth Century
I have found that to consider art as an anti-environment or as a means of perceiving the hidden dimension of the environment, is exceedingly useful. Instead of explaining to people that art is something to be taken seriously because of some inherent superior quality, it makes more sense to point out that art has an indispensable function in cognition, and that men without art strongly tend to be automata, or somnambulists, imprisoned in a dream.
Letter to Claude Bissell, January 28, (1966), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 333 -334.
Year: 1966
You can imagine some of the local yokel heartburn and nausea at the calamity of my “fame.” Wish you were here to enjoy the show.
Letter to John Wain, March 26, (1966), quoted in “The Incidental Thoughts of Marshall McLuhan,” in Wain’s Dear Shadows. Portraits from Memory (1986), p 102
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Hostility to McLuhan
Conversation has more vitality than books, more fun, more drama.
“Oracle of the Electric Age,” in Life Magazine, February 28, (1966), p 96
Year: 1966
I don’t agree or disagree with anything I say myself.
In “McLuhanisms” by Moira Walsh, America: National Catholic Weekly Review, May 28, (1966), p 784
Year: 1966
I merely regard myself as a probe.
In “McLuhanisms” by Moira Walsh, America: National Catholic Weekly Review, May 28, (1966), p 784
Year: 1966
I don’t have a point of view.
In “McLuhanisms” by Moira Walsh, America: National Catholic Weekly Review, May 28, (1966), p 784
Year: 1966
…two goats were chomping away on an MGM studio dump. One of them kicked open a can containing a picture of Gone with the Wind and was chomping away at this and got very excited, signalled to his pal, “Come on, get a bit of this.” When the other goat came over and nibbled away at it a bit, he said, “How do you like it?” He said, “Well, to be honest, I like the book better.” This is characteristic of the profundity of most media commentary.
“James Joyce and Television,” recorded lecture given at Fordham University, June 28, (1966), transcript, p 9
Year: 1966
I think of Western skies as one of the most beautiful things about the West and western horizons. The Westerner doesn't have a point of view. He has a vast panorama, he has such tremendous space around him... he has a total field of vision.
1970 CBC interview with Danny Finkelman & published in the collection of interviews Speaking of Winnipeg (Winnipeg: Queenston House, 1974), p. 23
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Perspective, Point of View
[On the delay in publishing his PhD dissertation, “Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time”]
I have learned so much about the entire problem [of the medieval conflicts between dialectic and grammar and rhetoric] since writing the thesis that I have hesitated to go ahead with publication without complete rewriting.
Letter to Tom Wolfe, October 25, 1966, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 327
Year: 1966
I don't want them to believe me. I just want them to think.
“Understanding McLuhan, by Him,” by Wallace Turner, The New York Times, November 22nd, (1966), p 43
Year: 1966
People make a great mistake trying to read me as if I were saying something.
“Understanding McLuhan, by Him,” by Wallace Turner, The New York Times, November 22nd, (1966), p 43
Year: 1966
ROBERT FULFORD: What kind of a world would you rather live in? …
McLUHAN: I would rather be in any period at all as long as people are going to leave it alone for a while.
FULFORD: But, they are not going to, are they?
McLUHAN: No, and so the only alternative is to understand everything that is going on, and then try to neutralize it as much as possible. Turn off as many buttons as you can and create as much frustration as possible. But, I am resolutely opposed to all innovation and all change, but I am determined to understand what is happening because I do not choose to just let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you are in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certainly to be something I am resolutely against. Therefore, it seems to me that the best way of opposing it is to understand it so that then you know where to turn off the button.
“Predicting Interactive Communication Via the Internet,” TV Appearance with Robert Fulford in the final episode of This Hour Has Seven Days, (1966), From Marshall McLuhan Speaks Transcript, pp 3-4
Year: 1966
I have the utmost contempt for all pop art and pop culture as content, but I have to live with it. Why not, therefore, understand it. As soon as you start analyzing and studying the processes involved, it becomes bearable.
Q and A with Marshall McLuhan, Take One, November-December, (1966), p 7
Year: 1966
This question highlights the difference between exposition and exploration. Anything that I know I can explain quite simply and directly. I can package it. Nearly everything I write is concerned with areas of exploration in which I am actively engaged in discovery. That is why I say, I have no point of view.
Text of an address to the Provincial Committee on the Aims and Objectives of Education of the Schools of Ontario, on January 19, (1967), p 11. Printed as “Education in the Electronic Age,” Interchange (Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education), Vol. 1, No. 4. (1970), reprinted as Chapter 12.3 in The Best of Times / The Worst of Times: Contemporary Issues in Canadian Education. (1972)
Year: 1967
[When asked why he so seldom proofreads or revises his books]
I tend to add and the whole thing gets out of hand.
Quoted in “Understanding McLuhan (in Part)” by Richard Kostelanetz, The New York Times, January 29, (1967), p. 206
Year: 1967
Good writing indicates an absence of thought.
Quoted in “Understanding McLuhan (in Part)” by Richard Kostelanetz, The New York Times, January 29, (1967), p. 206
Year: 1967
One of the greatest Canadians ever, and very little known, died at 59, Harold Innis. He was an Ontario Scot. I have followed him in communications work. He did some altogether new groundwork in the history of technology and economics. His own colleagues never understood him in his day, nor have they since. I am his only local follower.
“Understanding Canada and Sundry other matters: Marshall McLuhan “interview in Mademoiselle Magazine, January (1967), p 130
Year: 1967
I am an investigator. I make probes. I have no point of view. I do not stay in one position… Anyone in our culture is regarded as invited as long as he stays in one fixed position. Once he starts moving around and crossing boundaries, he’s delinquent, he’s fair game. The explorer is totally inconsistent. He never knows at what moment he will make some startling discovery. And consistency is a meaningless term to apply to an explorer. If he wanted to be consistent, he would stay home. Jacques Ellul says that propaganda begins when dialogue ends. I talk back to media and set off on an adventure of exploration.
I don’t explain – I explore.
“Casting My Perils Before Swains”, printed in McLuhan: Hot & Cool: A Primer For The Understanding Of & A Critical Symposium With A Rebuttal By McLuhan,(1967), p xiii
Year: 1967
MIKE McMANUS: But you wouldn't like to see the literate world disintegrate?
MARSHALL McLUHAN: By no means. My values are strongly centered in literacy, which I teach day and night, as it were.
McMANUS: And do you think it will survive?
McLUHAN: I imagine so. I think so.
Mike McManus TVO interview, 1977, transcript 19:16
Year: 1977
I accept media as I accept cosmos. They assume I'm for or against Gutenberg. Bunk! I think of technologies as highly identifiable objects made by our own bodies. They feel that technologies are strange, alien intruders from outer space.
“The Hot and Cool Interview with Gerald Stearn“, in McLuhan: Hot & Cool: A Primer For The Understanding Of & A Critical Symposium With A Rebuttal By McLuhan ,(1967), p 273, reprinted in Marshall McLuhan Essays Media Research : Technology Art Communication, (1997), p 58
Year: 1967
Repetition is really drilling. When I'm using a probe, I drill.
“The Hot and Cool Interview with Gerald Stearn“, in McLuhan: Hot & Cool: A Primer For The Understanding Of & A Critical Symposium With A Rebuttal By McLuhan ,(1967), p 273, reprinted in Marshall McLuhan Essays Media Research : Technology Art Communication, (1997), p 59
Year: 1967
The idea of using facts as probes—as means of getting into new territories—is utterly alien to them. They use facts as classified data, as categories, as packages.
“The Hot and Cool Interview with Gerald Stearn“, in McLuhan: Hot & Cool: A Primer For The Understanding Of & A Critical Symposium With A Rebuttal By McLuhan ,(1967), p 273- 274, reprinted in Marshall McLuhan Essays Media Research : Technology Art Communication, (1997), p 59
Year: 1967
I grope, I probe, I listen, I test—until the tumblers fall and I'm in. That's the way I work with all these media.
“The Hot and Cool Interview with Gerald Stearn“, in McLuhan: Hot & Cool: A Primer For The Understanding Of & A Critical Symposium With A Rebuttal By McLuhan ,(1967), p 274, reprinted in Marshall McLuhan Essays Media Research : Technology Art Communication, (1997), p 59
Year: 1967
No painter, no musician ever did anything without extreme exaggeration of a form or a mode, until he had exaggerated those qualities that interested him.
“The Hot and Cool Interview with Gerald Stearn“, in McLuhan: Hot & Cool: A Primer For The Understanding Of & A Critical Symposium With A Rebuttal By McLuhan ,(1967), p 277, reprinted in Marshall McLuhan Essays Media Research : Technology Art Communication, (1997), p 63
Year: 1967
I always like to talk about things which are to me puzzles.
“The Hot and Cool Interview with Gerald Stearn“, in McLuhan: Hot & Cool: A Primer For The Understanding Of & A Critical Symposium With A Rebuttal By McLuhan ,(1967), p 290 , reprinted in Marshall McLuhan Essays Media Research : Technology Art Communication, (1997), p 76
Year: 1967
You can be quite sure that if there are going to be McLuhanites, I am not going to be one of them. I know that anyone who learns anything will learn it slightly askew. I can imagine that having disciples would become a very great bother. It would disturb one’s freedom, privacy, work. If I just keep writing with great energy, no McLuhanite will ever be able to digest it all. My areas of probing, of exploring are very personal. But of course my work might produce considerable consequences for other people. Most of what I have to say is second hand, gathered however from esoteric sources. My favorite
“The Hot and Cool Interview with Gerald Stearn“, in McLuhan: Hot & Cool: A Primer For The Understanding Of & A Critical Symposium With A Rebuttal By McLuhan ,(1967), p 291 , reprinted in Marshall McLuhan Essays Media Research : Technology Art Communication, (1997), p 77
Year: 1967
We need new perceptions to cope. Our technologies are generations ahead of our thinking. If you even begin to think about these new technologies you appear as a poet because you are dealing with the present as the future. That is my technique.
“The Hot and Cool Interview with Gerald Stearn“, in McLuhan: Hot & Cool: A Primer For The Understanding Of & A Critical Symposium With A Rebuttal By McLuhan ,(1967), p 292, reprinted in Marshall McLuhan Essays Media Research : Technology Art Communication, (1997), p 78
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Anticipating Change | Rear View Mirror
I am violently and arrogantly Protestant by family tradition; but let no English Government therefore counter my allegiance: I am English enough to be an inveterate Republican and Home Ruler. It is true that one of my grandfathers was an Orangeman; but then his sister was an abbess; and his uncle, I am proud to say, was hanged as a rebel.
“The Marfleet Lectures”, March 16-17 (1967), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 108
Year: 1967
I do a lot of my work while I’m simply talking. I think a lot when I’m talking and perfect many ideas that way.
Weekend Magazine, March 18, 1967
Year: 1967
An idiot means a very private person, that's a Greek word, meaning a very private person. I'm losing my idiot status steadily, I'm becoming less and less private. I would much rather be an idiot.
“Do You Like TV?,” Sunday, CBC, March 19, 1967, transcript 02:46
Year: 1967
My first teaching job was at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and when I got up to face freshman classes there, I realized I was in a strange country and that I had to learn a good deal about it, from the very ground up. I began to study there popular culture as a way of setting up a more natural dialogue with my students, that is I began to study the sports, the humor, the comics and it was literally while studying “The New Yorker” and “Time” that I hit up only the discovery that if you don't understand these everyday things that are absolutely basic part of our lives, it's rather futile to be teaching Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold, and even Dr. Johnson, if you can't even grasp the nature of your own world, why spend your time studying somebody else's world?
“The Medium Is the Message,” TV interview with Fletcher Markle on CBC “Telescope 67,” (1967), transcript 02:59
Year: 1967
There's a sign hanging on a Toronto junkyard which reads, “help beautify junkyards, throw something lovely away today.” And this kind of bizarre, would-be cynical and paradoxical, sort of remark has, I think, some of the characteristics of a McLuhanism. Which consists perhaps simply in tying an unexpected circuit...things that don't ordinarily get off a simple, a single line, or a single plane; it's a form of circuitry.
“The Medium Is the Message,” TV interview with Fletcher Markle on CBC “Telescope 67,” (1967), transcript, p 1
Year: 1967
But travel has many forms and this kind of horizontal travel, on rolling stock [by train], is much more conducive to social life and reading and chat. Whereas when you go up in an airplane, you're suspended in a kind of time-zone. You're really out of space and you begin to work away at forming a destination image, or syndrome, that imprisons you in a kind of hope bubble or pattern.
“The Medium Is the Message,” TV interview with Fletcher Markle on CBC “Telescope 67,” (1967), transcript 11:02
Year: 1967
If I were to trust the observations of my critics, I would despond and despair to the point of cutting my throat.
“The Medium Is the Message,” TV interview with Fletcher Markle on CBC “Telescope 67,” (1967), transcript: 20:36
Year: 1967
It is mainly in the process of making discoveries that I find my satisfactions.
“The Medium Is the Message,” TV interview with Fletcher Markle on CBC “Telescope 67,” (1967), transcript: 20:36
Year: 1967
The Medium is the Massage is a look-around to see what's happening. It is a collide-oscope of interfaced situations.
The Medium is the Massage (1967), p 10
Year: 1967
BOB QUINTRELL: How do you...do you think of it in those terms? Yourself?
MCLUHAN: I understand why they do. I don't feel any need to associate myself with any of these forms. I study them.
BOB QUINTRELL: You're an observer.
MCLUHAN: I probe.
BOB QUINTRELL: But do you make any value judgments about what you find?
MCLUHAN: I can make all the conventional ones and all unconventional once, at the same time, but I tried to make us feel better judgment such as possible, because there was a time.
“On Literati Horrified by My Theories” interview with Bob Quintrell (1967), transcript 3:03
Year: 1967
[Subtitle of his 1968 book War and Peace in the Global Village]
An inventory of some of the current spastic situations that could be eliminated by more feed forward.
War and Peace in the Global Village (1968)
Year: 1968
I don’t think concepts have any relevance in religion. Analogy is not a concept. It is resonance. It is inclusive.
Letter to James Taylor, Associate Editor of the United Church Observer, Toronto, January 15, (1969), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, (1987), p 362
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Analogy
I can say that I do not think of God as a concept, but an immediate and ever-present fact – an occasion for continuous dialogue.
Letter to James Taylor, Associate Editor of the United Church Observer, Toronto, January 15, (1969), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan ,(1987), p 362
Year: 1969
Richards, Leavis, Eliot and Pound and Joyce in a few weeks opened the doors of perception on the poetic process, and its role in adjusting the reader to the contemporary world. My study of media began and remains rooted in the work of these men. Thomas Nashe was a Cambridge pet in my terms there. I did my doctoral study on him, approaching him via the process of verbal training from the Sophists through Cicero and Augustine and Dante to the Renaissance.
Foreword, The Interior Landscape (1969), pp xiii-xiv
Year: 1969
As a rule, I always look for what others ignore.
Quoted by Richard Kostelanetz in Master Minds (1969), p 91
Year: 1969
Temperamentally, I’m a stodgy conservative. If there are going to be McLuhanites, you can be sure that I’m not going to be one of them.
Quoted by Richard Kostelanetz in Master Minds (1969), p 99
Year: 1969
I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say.
Introduction to Cybernetics Simplified by Arthur Porter, (1969), p xvii
Year: 1969
My work is designed for the pragmatic purpose of trying to understand our technological environment and its psychic and social consequences. But my books constitute the process rather than the completed product of discovery; my purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as means of insight, of pattern recognition, rather than to use them in the traditional and sterile sense of classified data, categories, containers. I want to map new terrain rather than chart old landmarks.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media”. By Eric Norden”, in Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 54
Year: 1969
As an investigator, I have no fixed point of view, no commitment to any theory, my own or anyone else's. As a matter of fact, I'm completely ready to junk any statement I've ever made about any subject if events don't bear me out, or if I discover it isn't contributing to an understanding of the problem. The better part of my work on media is actually somewhat like a safe-cracker's. I don't know what's inside; maybe it's nothing. I just sit down and start to work. I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try
out different sequences — until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media.” By Eric Norden”, in Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 54, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 236
Year: 1969
Any approach to environmental problems must be sufficiently flexible and adaptable to encompass the entire environmental matrix, which is in constant flux. I consider myself a generalist, not a specialist who has staked out a tiny plot of study as his intellectual turf and is oblivious to everything else. Actually, my work is a depth operation, the accepted practice in most modern disciplines from psychiatry to metallurgy and structural analysis. Effective study of the media deals not only with the content of the media but with the media themselves and the total cultural environment within which the media function. Only by standing aside from any phenomenon and taking an overview can you discover its operative principles and lines of force. There's really nothing inherently startling or radical about this study — except that for some reason few have had the vision to undertake it For the past 3500 years of the Western world, the effects of media–whether it’s speech, writing, printing, photography, radio or television–have been systematically overlooked by social observers. Even in today’s revolutionary electronic age, scholars evidence few signs of modifying this traditional stance of ostrich like disregard.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media.” By Eric Norden”, in Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 54, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 236 - 237
Year: 1969
I neither approve nor disapprove. I merely try to understand.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media”. By Eric Norden, in Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 65, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 244
Year: 1969
I’m not advocating anything; I’m merely probing and predicting trends. Even if I opposed them or thought them disastrous, I couldn’t stop them, so why waste my time lamenting? As Carlyle said of author Margaret Fuller after she remarked, “I accept the Universe”: “She’d better.” I see no possibility of a worldwide Luddite rebellion that will smash all machinery to bits, so we might as well sit back and see what is happening and what will happen to us in a cybernetic world.
Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media”. By Eric Norden, in Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 74, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p264.
Year: 1969
The first and most vital step of all, as I said at the outset, is simply to understand media and their revolutionary effects on all psychic and social values and institutions. Understanding is half the battle. The central purpose of all my work is to convey this message, that by understanding media as they extend man, we gain a measure of control over them. And this is a vital task, because the immediate interface between audile-tactile and visual perception is taking place everywhere around us.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media”. By Eric Norden, in Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 74, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 265.
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Mastering Technology
I do see the prospect of a rich and creative retribalized society — free of the fragmentation and alienation of the mechanical age — emerging from this traumatic period of culture clash; but I have nothing but distaste for the process of change. As a man molded within the literate Western tradition, I do not personally cheer the dissolution of that tradition through the electric involvement of all the senses: I don't enjoy the destruction of neighbourhoods by high-rises or revel in the pain of identity quest.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media”. By Eric Norden, in Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 158. Reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 267.
Year: 1969
For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the Industrial Revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism. But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was, and I began to realize that the greatest artists of the 20th Century -- Yeats, Pound, Joyce, Eliot -- had discovered a totally different approach, based on the identity of the processes of cognition and creation. I realized that artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience -- from trash to treasures. I ceased being a moralist and became a student… The world we are living in is not one I would have created on my own drawing board, but it's the one in which I must live, and in which the students I teach must live. If nothing else, I owe it to them to avoid the luxury of moral indignation or the troglodytic security of the ivory tower and to get down into the junk yard of environmental change and steam-shovel my way through to a comprehension of its contents and its lines of force -- in order to understand how and why it is metamorphosing man… Cataclysmic environmental changes… are, in and of themselves, morally neutral; it is how we perceive them and react to them that will determine their ultimate psychic and social consequences.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media”. By Eric Norden, in Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 158 Reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 268.
Year: 1969
I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey. To be born this age is a precious gift, and I regret the prospect of my own death only because I will leave so many pages of man's destiny — if you will excuse the Gutenbergian image — tantalizingly unread. But perhaps, as I've tried to demonstrate in my examination of the postliterate culture, the story begins only when the book closes.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media”. By Eric Norden, in Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 158 (1969), in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 268-269
Year: 1969
However, I never make value judgments, I make probes, I poke away, here and there, to see what I can find, as I say “my own values are literary, my own values are entirely on the side of civilization”. On, the other hand I don't live in that kind of a world and so, I do probe the world I live in and it happens to be an auditory Echo Land and a full of hippies and hippies and beetles, who crawled out from under things, like Kafka´s bug in the metamorphosis.
“[Marshall McLuhan] Address to The Book and Author Luncheon at New York City Shoreham Hotel”, December 7th, (1969), retrieved from McLuhan’s Wake DVD extras transcript: 18:52
Year: 1969
“Style is a way of seeing," said Flaubert, and since Flaubert, art and literature have consciously assumed the task of probing our new technological environments. Art and literature have revealed the characters of the new environments created by technologies, by setting up counter-environments. It has been my study of contemporary poetry and painting that has drawn me to examine the new human environments wrought by the physical extensions of our own human body. It is the artists and poets who have taught me that the "Emperor’s new clothes" are not visible without the aid of art, to use the phrase of Wyndham Lewis, are engaged in hypnotized contemplation of the Emperor’s old clothes.
“Autobiography,” an undated three-page typescript, from the early 1970s, p 2
Year: 1970
I had begun my university studies as a student of engineering, because of my interest in structure and design. It becomes more clear each day that structure and design in all levels of human organization are becoming orchestral. Our new electric age no longer presents any specialized cultural gradient. Ours is the age of the zero-gradient in which all times and cultures are in a continuous dialogue. To be a participant in this dialogue is most satisfying.
“Autobiography,” an undated three-page typescript, from the early 1970s, p 2
Year: 1970
[In 1938] I met Corinne Lewis of Fort Worth, Texas, who was studying at the Pasadena Playhouse. We were married in 1939 and now have six children, the eldest and youngest of whom are boys. By way of participating in the dialogue of this time, I find the open perceptions of all these teenage boys and girls a very rich means of keeping in touch with our time.
“Autobiography,” an undated three-page typescript, from the early 1970s, p 2
Year: 1970
As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 13
Year: 1970
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
The more fidelity to visual appearance the picture or image happens to capture, the more the person is imprisoned in a specialized category or classification.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 203
Year: 1970
At the beginning of his very flattering essay on myself in The Pump House Gang (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Tom Wolfe has a drawing of me which at once suggests another title for his essay (“What if he’s right?’’), namely, “I'd Rather Be Wrong." At the end of his essay he confronts me with a waitress in a topless restaurant to whom I uttered the assurance: ‘The topless waitress is the thin edge of a trial balloon!" (I.e., the silicone bust.)
Culture is Our Business, (1970), p 212
Year: 1970
I don’t think that it was accidental that Christianity began in the Greco-Roman culture. I don’t think that Christ would have suffered under Genghis Khan with the same meaning as under Pontius Pilate. The Greeks had invented a medium, the phonetic alphabet, which, as Eric Havelock explains in his book Preface to Plato, made it possible for men to have for the first time in the history a sense of private identity… Christianity was introduced into a matrix of culture in which the individual had enormous significance: this is not characteristic of other world cultures.
“Electric Consciousness and the Church” Interview with Hubert Hoskins, (1970), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 80
Year: 1970
I make most of my discoveries while talking… Nearly every insight I’ve ever made in my life occurred to me while talking to people. In the classroom, I make more discoveries than I do anywhere else.
Undated Monday Night Seminar, recorded and available on YouTube as “Marshall McLuhan 1969-1972; full recording of a Monday Night Seminar at Toronto University”; transcript, p 17
Year: 1969
Anyone engaged in exploration uses every available approach, every available foothold, every accessible crevice to which to cling as he scales the unknown rockface. The actual process of dialogue and discovery is not compatible with packaging of familiar views. A person engaged in exposition has nothing new to say, and he cannot communicate the effects of participating in the process of discovery.
“Education in the Electronic Age”, in Interchange, Vol 1, No 4, (1970), p 11
Year: 1970
My metaphysical approach is not moral. That is why I get such very great joy from contemplating these forms of culture.
Letter to J. G. Keogh, July 6, 1970, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, (1987), p 412
Year: 1970
As you know, the theme of From Cliché to Archetype (which should be out fairly soon from Viking) is that every new technology scraps the environment created by the preceding one, but at the same time retrieves a much older mode of experience.
Letter to Joe Keough, July 6, 1970, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, (1987), p 413
Year: 1970
I am not a ‘culture critic’ because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world.
Letter to J.G. Keogh, July 6, (1970), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, (1987), p 413
Year: 1970
I’m not in favour of change at any time because it’s such a nuisance. I resent the demands it makes on my energy. As far as following a whim of fashion, why, that’s ridiculous. If clothing were actually used to enhance the quality of life and beauty, well that would be different. But it’s never been handled that way, except in primitive times. By the Balinese, for example, who said: “We have no art. We do everything as naturally as possible.”
“Miniskirt Tribalism,” interview in Rags, October (1970), p 23
Year: 1970
I have published four serious and completely different types of books during this year. Have just completed [Take Today] The Executive as Dropout: The Future of the Human Organization. This latter is unlike anything I have written before and has been done in collaboration with an electric engineer. My procedure is not to express myself on any subject but to go where the hangups are, then to do a structural analysis of causes. Understanding is not a point of view. Value judgments that precede understanding create smog. Cliché to Archetype is an account of the poetic process as it works in our corporate daily lives. Preliterate man does not have an unconscious. Electronic man is now living with his subliminal life merged with his consciousness. The resulting loss of private and individual direction creates a goalless world: all tooled up and no place to go.
Letter to Peter Newman, December 8, (1970), (LAC)
Year: 1970
I’ve always been very careful never to predict anything that had not already happened. The future is not what it used to be.
TV Appearance with Tom Wolfe on TVO’s “Brave New Words,” (1970), from Marshall McLuhan Speaks transcript, p 3
Year: 1970
I have been asked, ‘Why is it your letters to newspapers are simple and clear and your books are so difficult?’ In writing to newspapers, I am expounding my thoughts. In my books, I am not expounding or making exposition… I am an explorer, not an explainer. It never occurs to people that you might use the printed word for exploration.
“Interview with Marshall McLuhan,” The Mike (Student newspaper, St. Michael’s College), February 5, (1971), quoted in W.T. Gordon’s MM: Escape into Understanding, (1997), p 62
Year: 1971
Naturally, this method dictates what shall be studied. If I have a point of view about the human condition as a result of investigating the effects of media, it is simply that people are somnambulist.
Letter to Frank Kermode, March 4, (1971), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, (1987), p 426
Year: 1971
Chapter:
Sleepwalkers
It is very salutary to have a daily charade of human malice and stupidity mingled with warmth and insight.
Letter to Claude Bissell, March 23, 1971, Quoted in W.T. Gordon’s MM: Escape into Understanding, (1997), p 193
Year: 1971
Exile, physical or psychic, seems to be a necessary feature of the writer’s existence. My interest in popular culture as an art form arouses uneasiness in many quarters. Manipulators of these arts seem to panic whenever their efforts are regarded seriously.
“The Table Talk of Marshall McLuhan”, Interview with Peter C. Newman, in Maclean´s magazine, June, (1971), p 45
Year: 1971
Did Dr. Miller succeed in keeping his nose clean while dirtying his hands in modern media, or did he just blow his mind? Honest Jonathan now demands "ocular proof” of media effects. As James Joyce writes: "As for the viability of vicinals, when invisible they are invincible." Does Dr. Miller believe he can gain immunity from invincible media effects by shrouding himself in "the canons of traditional thought" and by taking refuge in "the conventional vocabulary of vision"?
Letter to The Listener October 8, (1971), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, (1987), p 445
Year: 1971
I have no theories whatever about anything. I make observations by way of discovering contours, lines of force and pressures. I satirize at all times and my hyperboles are as nothing compared to the events to which they refer. If you study symbolism you will discover that it is a technique of rip-off by which figures are deliberately deprived of their ground. You do not seem to have grasped that the message as it relates to the medium, is never the content, but the corporate effects of the medium as an environment of service and disservice…
Letter to William Kuhns, December 6, (1971), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 448
Year: 1971
At instant speeds the abiding war is the war of icons and images, achieved by alliances and misalliances in a sequence of unholy deadlocks.
Take Today; The Executive As Dropout, (1972), p 156
Year: 1972
Tomorrow is Our Permanent Address.
Take Today; The Executive as Dropout with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 224
Year: 1972
Cat-gut and cat-calls cum Gregorian. The mass gets longer, limper, lumpier.
Diary Entry May 21,(1972) Diary, quoted in Philip Marchand, McLuhan the Medium and Messenger (1989), p 206
Year: 1972
I am not entirely sure why I choose to avoid a personal manifesto of my feelings or attitudes in such matters. This may be merely personal to myself, but I am always baffled when people ask me how I am feeling. As a form of greeting, it makes me wince with its callous and careless unconcern masquerading as good-will. Sometimes I stop these people and ask them point-blank: "Do you really want to know? Because it may take quite a while to tell you!" Perhaps some of this centers into my feelings about personal expression concerning the odious and sickening manifestations of human greed and aggression. I would wish to avoid any appearance of moral superiority in
confronting human depravity. It is so easy to borrow virtue by juxtaposing oneself with viciousness. On the other hand if one has a name or a position which could be used to mitigate evils, it would be unpardonable to refrain. I may say that I consider the Delos meetings as of a very dubious quality and performance. The participants of all such gatherings seek reassurance for their convictions rather than new awareness of their inadequacy. My own concern is with the exploration of ignorance rather than the shoring-up of existing knowledge. In the above observations I have really been exploring my own ignorance of myself I hope you will point out for me a useful course of action or intervention in this matter if I have overlooked it.
Letter to Margaret Mead, January 25, (1973), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, (1987), p 463-464
Year: 1973
Many people imagine that I am promoting a point of view. However, understanding is not a point of view, and requires a multi-dimensional approach, a "swarming over" every situation. Understanding is achieved through continuing dialogue on current problems, not "long debate" on “dead" issues. Debate packages knowledge for display, whereas dialogue organizes ignorance for discovery.
“Understanding McLuhan--and fie on any who don't”, in The Globe and Mail, Sep 10, (1973), p 7
Year: 1973
The future is not what it used to be; neither is causality, for thought travels much faster and farther than light.
The Argument: Causality in the Electric World” (1973), in McLuhan Unbound (2017), p 30
Year: 1973
I may be wrong but I’m never in doubt.
MM’s “Joke Journal,” (1973)
Year: 1973
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.
From a (1973) untitled, single typed page of jokes and one-liners provided by Gerry Feigen
Year: 1973
My writings baffle most people simply because I begin with ground and they begin with figure. I begin with effects and work round to the causes, whereas the conventional pattern is to start with a somewhat arbitrary selection of “causes” and then try to match these with some of the effects. It is a haphazard matching process that leads to fragmentary superficiality. As for myself, I do not have a point of view, but simply work with the total situation as obvious figures against a hidden ground.
Letter to Franklin R. Gannon, June 12, (1973), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, (1987), p 478
Year: 1973
[When asked to write a piece to educators in Learning magazine]
So far, I have not really had anything directly to say to educators as a group. The gist of my approach is satirical, only by telling it the way it is. Insofar as a satirical wrenching of the dormant programmed life is educational, I might be grouped into that category.
Letter to Jerome Agel, October 18, (1973)
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Satirist
[Responding to a request for a formal acknowledgment of Israel and its right to exist]
My own writing has been concerned with the development, in the simultaneous electric world, of the physical unity of the human family. I would be happy if you could suggest to me an effective approach to these matters that would enable me to make a forceful and convincing statement. As a Catholic who thinks of himself as a Jew spiritually, and as a student of the media, who thinks of us all politically, as members of the same family, what do you suggest I might say?
Letter to Sidney Halpern, January 9, (1974), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 488
Year: 1974
My study of today is based on the idea that there may be a pattern to these events that, if recognized, might be used for human good.
“Review of Books and Religion” (1974), p 15
Year: 1974
You are taking your academic life in your hands when you write about Innis and McLuhan. You must be a fearless character. I have never found anybody who was really interested in anything who was also afraid to take the consequences of disapproval.
Letter to James W. Carey, March 25, (1974), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 492
Year: 1974
As for getting understanding, that depends entirely upon the reader. The user is always the content, and the user is often very evasive, or very stupid. Nobody could pretend serious interest in my work who was not completely familiar with all of the works of James Joyce and the French Symbolists.
Letter to Marshall Fishwick, July 31, (1974), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, (1987), p 505
Year: 1974
…at thirty seven thousand feet, there is no Grand Canyon and no Rocky Mountains. The most beautiful view on this planet had become a smudge. The tips of the highest mountains appeared as incidental bits of cotton wool beneath us. I will never fly a jumbo again.
Letter to Yves Pratt, Chairman of Air Canada, September 16, (1974)
Year: 1974
My purpose is to invite criticism, directed not at me or at my rhetoric, but rather at the substance and contents of my thoughts
“McLuhan’s Laws of the Media,” Technology and Culture, Vol.16 , No.1, January (1975), p 74
Year: 1975
I still feel very much like the New Yorker cartoon lady who said, I don't know what I think until I say it.
A Report of The Fourth Annual Conference on The Teaching of The English Language Arts, (1975), p 7
Year: 1975
Develop the power and habit of listening. It is not a power that I have, and nobody ever told me how to go about getting it.
Letter to Eric McLuhan, September 24, (1975), (LAC)
Year: 1975
We had to put the TV down in the recreation room [in the basement] because when we had it up here we looked at it too often.
Nancy Cole interview, (1975-76), transcript, p 17
Year: 1975
Tom Snyder: Forgive my impertinence, but has anybody asked you why you are sometimes difficult to understand?
Marshall McLuhan: It’s because I use the right hemisphere when they’re trying to use the left one.
Tom Synder: Okay well…
McLuhan: Simple.
Tom Snyder: After I get back on one…
McLuhan: You see, ordinarily, people are trained to try to follow you and to connect everything you say with what they last heard. They’re not prepared to use their wits. They’re only prepared to use the idea they picked the first time and try to connect it to another idea. So, if you’re in a situation that is flexible, where you have to use your wits and perceptions, they can’t follow you. They have preconceptions that phase them out at once.
“What Television Does Best,” an NBC appearance with Tom Snyder (1976), from Marshall McLuhan Speaks, transcript, p 5-6
Year: 1976
I poke sentences around to probe and feel my way around in our kind of world. I don't expect [the readers] to believe what I say, I just want them to think.
“Introduction “in Faces of Canada, January 1st (1976), p 41
Year: 1976
A New Yorker cartoon a few months ago showed two fish that had climbed out on the shore. One said to the other, “This is where the action is." A wit has said we don't know who discovered water, but we're pretty sure it wasn't a fish.
“The Marfleet Lectures” , March 16-17 (1967),reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 106
Year: 1967
It is the present which is also the future.
“Television as a Debating Medium,” TV Appearance on NBC-TV with Tom Brokaw, 1976, from “Marshall McLuhan Speaks” transcript, p 3
Once I'm in the air, no distractions, nobody can interrupt me. Thank heavens they don't have telephones on the planes yet, and nobody can get at you.
"It Will Probably End the Motor Car," Interview with Kirwin Cox and S. M. Crean, Cinema Canada, No.30, August (1976), p 28
Year: 1976
My work has been a dialogue between the two hemispheres in which the characteristics of the right hemisphere are given so much recognition that I have become unintelligible to the left hemisphere people.
Letter to Ruth Nanda Anshen, September 2, (1976), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, (1987), p 522
Year: 1976
Me? Personally? I’m neither pessimist nor optimist… I’m an apocalyptic!
“Futurechurch: Edward Wakin interviews Marshall McLuhan”, in U.S. Catholic Magazine, Vol 42 N1 January, (1977), p 6 republished as “Our Only Hope Is Apocalypse,” in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 59
Year: 1977
I never came into the church as a person who was being taught. I came in on my knees. That is the only way in. When people start praying they need truths; that’s all. You don’t come into the Church by ideas and concepts, and you cannot leave by mere disagreement. It has to be a loss of faith, a loss of participation. You can tell when people leave the Church: they have quit praying.
“Futurechurch: Edward Wakin interviews Marshall McLuhan”, in U.S. Catholic Magazine, Vol 42 N1 January, (1977), p 6 republished as “Our Only Hope Is Apocalypse,” in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 64
Year: 1977
As a teacher of literacy, my primary concern has always been the understanding of literacy and its environmental polluters.
Letter to the Editor, in The Miami Herald, February. 15, (1977)
Year: 1977
Personally, I am not only dedicated to the teaching of literacy, but also to the study of how to overcome the effects of TV in undermining literacy. There are specific physical exercises which can overcome the visual effects of TV watching, especially the use of the trampoline in grade school years. The fact that 90% of all learning disabilities relate only to the male population, points to one of the special TV effects in relation to the motor muscles of the eyes.
Letter to the Editor, The Miami Herald, February 15, (1977)
Year: 1977
I am not here engaged in trying to prove a materialist determinism of historical change, since the very idea of determinism, of lineal cause and effect, supposes a continuity and connectedness that never existed in any historical situation.
“The Hidden Information Environment”, Address to American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business, Toronto, April 15, (1977) ,Typescript printed in AACSB Bulletin, Vol 13, No 4, (1977) p 25
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Causality
Why does the Church have to get rid of traditional roles and costumes at precisely the moment when these corporate modes of expression are recognized as essential to
“Liturgy and Media: Do Americans Go to Church to be Alone? the third conversation with Pierre Babin”, (1973) reprinted in The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion (1999), p 141
Year: 1973
McMANUS: But I'm thinking more about the fact that, born in Winnipeg and mastered in English, and English as largely studied in Cambridge for graduate studies, how English was largely your world, and literature — it's been under attack by these new electronic media, especially television. [Has] this been hard on you?
McLUHAN: I don't think so. Because there's always the challenge of meeting the opposition head on.
“The Education of Mike McManus,” TVO interview, (1977), transcript: 18:49
Year: 1977
McMANUS: So, in 15 seconds, I've got one question for you: how much television do you watch?
McLUHAN: Whenever I get a chance, which is not too often. I missed Rigoletto last night, I was very disappointed.
McMANUS: But you don't watch it that often?
McLUHAN: No, I don't have that many opportunities.
“The Education of Mike McManus,” TVO interview, (1977), transcript: 27:45
Year: 1977
It is true that my “impenetrability” results from the fact that I do not use any ideas at all, but perceptions only. The untrained intellectual deals only with concepts and theories, and has little skill in the study of effects and consequences. This condition extends to the journalistic world.
Letter to the Editor of the Toronto Star, July 4 , (1978), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan ,(1987) p 540
Year: 1978
It is necessary to have the audience in focus when writing aphoristically because it is an auditory and oral form of address.
Letter to R.I.K Davidson, Editor at U of Toronto Press, September 26, (1978)
Year: 1978
The only thing that makes history readable is the anecdote.
Letter to Gwen Pilkington, February 16, (1979)
Year: 1979
QUESTION: Do you consider yourself an artist?
MCLUHAN: Entirely. Always have been. Nothing else.
QUESTION: Then why (he doctorate, the structures of academe?
MCLUHAN: Well, I have never attempted to win the respect of my academic colleagues. I have flaunted them right, left and centre, as you can tell from their response. No, I am not in their league, not playing their bureaucratic, pedantic game. It doesn’t interest me.
I am completely against the culture’s grain. However, the advantage of going against the grain is that you know when you are on course.
QUESTION: If people accepted your insights...?
MCLUHAN: I would panic. I would assume they lost their noodle.
“Genius or Whimsy? Some McLuhanisms,” in Sunday Post of Canada, May 13 (1979), p 13
Year: 1979
I never make mistakes because I never predict anything that hasn't already happened. The present is very difficult to see. It takes enormous energy, and most people don't have enough energy to see anything, let alone the present. That's why they talk about the future. The present is much too difficult. Poets are perfectly aware of the fact that the ordinary population of the world is somnambulous. Jung developed his essay on the unconscious on the theory that the people of this world are asleep.
“Genius or Whimsy? Some McLuhanisms,” in Sunday Post of Canada, May 13 (1979), p 13
Year: 1979
As long as I am violently disapproved of, I know I'm on course.
“Genius or Whimsy? Some McLuhanisms,” in Sunday Post of Canada May 13 (1979), p 13
Year: 1979
Today, the only hope of being sane is to be a complete misfit.
“Genius or Whimsy? Some McLuhanisms,” in Sunday Post of Canada May 13 (1979), p 13
Year: 1979
I prayed to God the Father for two or three years, simply saying, “Show me.” I didn’t want proof of anything. I didn’t know what I was going to be shown. Because I didn’t believe in anything. I was shown very suddenly. It didn’t happen in any expected way. It came instantly as immediate evidence, and without any question of being a divine intervention. I never had any need for religion, any personal or emotional crisis. I simply wanted to know what was true, and I was told… Wham. I became a Catholic the next day.
“Marshall McLuhan’s Message of Faith,” in Sunday Post of Canada, May 20 (1979)
Year: 1979
All my work is satire.
Quoted by B.W. Powe, “McLuhan: the Put-On,” in A Climate Changed (1984), p 9
Year: 1984
How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?
Quoted, by Barry Day in “A McLuhan Symposium,” in Marshall McLuhan The Man and His Message (1989), p 112
Year: 1989
I do a lot of my serious work while I'm talking out loud to people. I'm feeling around, not making pronouncements. Most people use speech as a result of thought, but I use it as the process.
Quoted by Philip Marchand in Marshall McLuhan. The Medium and the Messenger, (1989), p 58
Year: 1989
Man should maintain a constant, nonstop dialogue with his creator. And for that kind of dialogue you don’t need even to be verbal, let alone grammatical.
Quoted by S.D. Neil in “McLuhan Remembered”, in Clarifying McLuhan (1993), p 111
Year: 1993
Do you really want to know what I think of that thing? [TV set] If you want to save one shred of Hebrao-Greco-Roman-Medieval-Renaissance-Enlightenment-Modern-Western civilization, you'd better get an ax and smash all the sets.
Cited by Gordon, W.T. (1997), Marshall McLuhan: Escape Into Understanding. Toronto: Stoddart, p. 301. The attribution reads “Marshall McLuhan to Tom Langan, While Watching TV.
Year: 1997
We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t a fish. A pervasive medium, a pervasive environment, is always beyond perception.
Video segment shown in “McLuhan´s Wake,” NFB film (2002), 01:49:05
Year: 2002
Books are like pieces of music, each has to be taken at its own pace. My books have to be read very slowly if they are to be understood.
As quoted in "Marshall McLuhan Expanded the Frontiers of Humanity Series: Portraits of History,” by Robert Fleming, Kingston Whig-Standard, Friday, February 20th, 2004
Year: 2004
I am a Roman Catholic and the Roman Catholic Church is just as befuddled as it was by the Gutenberg age. More so! They are still attempting to look for lines and blueprints, which no longer exist. They are not there. So what do you do? Well we have not discovered the strategies of behaviour or response for a situation in which there are no boundaries. It is like being in total space
Quoted in International Journal of McLuhan Studies: Understanding Media, Today. McLuhan in the Era of Convergence Culture. Volume 1, 2011, p. 38
Year: 2011
The telegraph, telephone, radio, and teletype have caused the dis- appearance of physical space and national and cultural boundaries, and have restored the most primal conditions of primitive Christianity. At the same time, this instantaneous character brings down an avalanche of historical, bureaucratic confusion upon the new oral church. The electric technology that abolishes central bureaucracy and organization also retrieves the entire past of the church—oral, written, bureaucratic, and historical.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 191
Year: 1972
…much of the complaint about the rosary is repetitive, is precisely, replay and it is a perpetual deepening, not a superficial treatment at all. But there is in the replay, a deeper awareness of the pattern and of the events that have taken place, the pattern of events, the process and so, replay offers a deeper level of awareness than the first play and I think the Rosary is a perpetual way of deepening our awareness and the repetitions are really very close to the world of resonance…
“Televised interview by Father Patrick Peyton”, on Father Peyton’s Family Theatre, 1972, Youtube, transcript, p 2
Year: 1972
I myself cannot think of anything catastrophic or traumatic about my own relation to the Church, it is been to me a steady source of nutrition, a study source of strength a steady and unremitting source of simple fundamental nourishment, I think of the church as an all nourishing mother and you never you don't need any one kind of nourishment, you need many kinds and so my own, as I say, relation to the church, has been a very steady matter of constant appeal for daily nourishment and this is where to me the church is the obvious and irreplaceable fact and I've never had a great deal of concern about the dogmatic problems or about the theological problems and these seem to me to be taken care of quite naturally by the steady flow of nourishment.
“Televised interview by Father Patrick Peyton”, on Father Peyton’s Family Theatre, 1972; transcript, pp 6-7
Year: 1972
…why, as a student of literature and the arts, I became aware of the enormous role that the [Catholic] Church had played in underpinning these great human activities over the centuries. I was aware that the Church had always been on the side of art and intellect and that the effects of the Church therefore were everywhere for men to see and admire, but the causes remain hidden.
“Televised interview by Father Patrick Peyton”, on Father Peyton’s Family Theatre, 1972, Transcript, p 6
Year: 1972
I became aware that if you're really going to test the reality of a church you had to test it on its own ground and the church, as a ground, demands that we approach it by prayer and I simply decided to meet that need of prayer as an approach to the church and simply to ask “show me”, is it true? Just show me. And the evidence came unexpectedly and from many quarters and unmistakeably and I think that, it might be a rather interesting scientific experiment for any non-believers, they're called, to simply get down on his knees for a few hours every week and demand that he be shown the reality of this unknown thing and it doesn't depend, anybody will soon discover, it does not depend upon concepts, theories, ideas, it is a thing with a life that is available to all who want to share in that life but it must be demanded. Seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you, but you have to knock and you have to knock pretty hard.
Televised interview by Father Patrick Peyton, Father Peyton’s Family Theatre, 1972, Transcript, pp 6-7
Year: 1972
MCMANUS: You describe your conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1938 as a long pilgrimage and a solitary one done entirely by reading.
MCLUHAN: That's, I think, true, except, again, I had luck. I met people, too. But it was mainly a literary activity.
“The Education of Mike McManus,” TVO interview, 1977, transcript 20:23
Year: 1977
I was with a group of people who said as I spoke, “Why aren’t you a Catholic?” I couldn’t think of one reason. I was beat. I became a Catholic at once, because I knew that was the divine work. I had converted myself by working at the whole question. I didn’t have any point of view, any problems. I had no difficulties. I’ve never had any difficulties. By the way, faith is not a matter of concepts, it’s precepts, a matter of immediate reality.
“Genius or Whimsy? Some McLuhanisms,” in Sunday Post of Canada, May 13 (1979), LAC of page
Year: 1979
[To his Mother Elsie, at the age of 24]
Let me tell you that religion is not a nice comfortable thing that can be scouted by cultivated lecturers like the Pidgeons. It is veritably something which, if it could be presented in an image, would make your hair stand on end.
Letter to Elsie McLuhan, September 5, 1935, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 75
Year: 1935
Coleridge represented the movement to reconcile neo-Platonism and Christianity as a means of envisaging social and political institutions sub specie aeternitatis, as opposed to the utilitarian functionalists and mechanists for whom the entire fabric of society was unpenetrated by the divine.
“Coleridge as Artist” (1957), in The Interior Landscape, (1969), p 121
Year: 1957
Protestantism was born with printing and seems to be passing with it.
Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters” The McAuley Lectures: Christian Humanism in Letters, Saint Joseph College, West Hartford Connecticut, (1954), p 58, reprinted in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 163.
Year: 1954
And evangelical zeal is now centered in the department of sales and distribution rather than in preaching. But the scientific structure and moral patterns of the monastic discipline are still intact, so that anybody seeking to understand or modify the religious inte4nsity of modern technology and business has to look closely into these antecedents.
The Mechanical Bride (1951), p 33
Year: 1951
Chapter:
Roles
[Latin] was a victim of the microphone on the altar. It is not practical to say Latin into a microphone, since the mike sharpens and intensifies the sounds of Latin to a meaningless degree. That is, Latin is really a very cool form of verbal delivery in which mutter and murmur play a large role, whereas the mike does not take kindly to humming indistinctly.
“Liturgy and the Microphone”, (1974), p 15
Year: 1974
[A]mplifiers which are placed in the church to create sound from all directions at once, make the church architecturally obsolete. In a word, the mike makes the worshippers demand and intimate and small group of participants.
“Liturgy and the Microphone”, (1974), p 15
Year: 1974
The microphone, which makes it so easy for a speaker to be heard by many, also forbids him to exhort or to be vehement. The mike is indeed a cool medium.
“Liturgy and the Microphone”, (1974), p 15
Year: 1974
… one can see the matter in parallel form in the discovery by the preacher that the microphone is incompatible with vehement exhortation or stern admonition. To a public that is electronically participant in a completely acoustic situation, loudspeakers bring the sounds of the preacher from several directions at once. The structure of our churches is obsolesced by the multi-directional media speaker system, and the older distance between speaker and audience is gone. The audience is now in immediate relation with the speaker, a factor which also turns the celebrant around to face the congregation. These major aspects of liturgical change were unforeseen and unplanned and remain unacknowledged by the users of the microphone system in our churches
. “Liturgy and the Microphone”, (1974), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 114
Year: 1974
We live probably in the most religious age that has ever existed.
“Electric Consciousness and the Church” (1979), p 1
Year: 1979
Chapter:
Religion
I am more and more inclined to return to conventional statement and paragraphing, if only as a respite. On the whole, the paragraph tends to be soporific to our situation today.
Letter to Sister Mary Joan Cook, January 26, 1973 [LAC]
Year: 1973
I do not move along lines. I use points like the dots in a wire-photo.
Letter to Robert Fulford, June 1, 1964 [LAC]
Year: 1964
Never go after anything less than big game.
Reported by Eric McLuhan as an oft-repeated private maxim of his father
Chapter:
Xerography
I am careful to make my statements annoying.
Tape of interview with Thomas Cooper, 1976
Year: 1976
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
Once you become an explorer there’s no place to stop.
“If the Media Didn't Get Marshall McLuhan's Message in the in the '60s, Another Is on the Way”, by Barbara Rowes, People Magazine, Vol. 6, no. 12, September 20, 1976; p 4 of the interview transcript
Year: 1976
You can keep a surer course when you swim against the current.
Spoken in conversation to William Kuhns in 1970 when asked why he preferred to stay in Canada
Year: 1970
I shall always remember my shock on arriving at Cambridge to discover the ordinary mediocrity of the ordinary Cambridge undergraduate.
Letter to Peter Drucker, April 18, 1960 [LAC]
Year: 1960
Left handers are the only people in the right mind.
Quoted by Tom Cooper in Wisdom Weavers (2025)
Year: 2025
Chapter:
He’s Doubtful
“You are infatuated with the exuberance of your own verbosity” – Disraeli
Jotted in the margin of McLuhan’s 1930 Diary
Year: 1930
I like living in Canada because it keeps me in a constant state of annoyance.
Said in conversation with William Kuhns in 1970
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Canada
(Written at age 22) "My nature is intense in its likes and dislikes, and this is further advanced by my isolation from free social activity."
"Personal Apologia," handwritten self-examination inscribed on the back of a concert programme with the byline date of January 30, 1933
[Written at 22] Reality is whatever can have effects on us sans our coop. (attr. To Basenquet)
“A Personal Apologia,” Jan. 30, 1933 (LAC)
Chapter:
Tools We Shape, Reshape Us
[Written at 22] Everyman is the Adam of his own soul.
“A Personal Apologia,” Jan. 30, 1933 (LAC)
I have gone thro' the horrible book of Winter with the sensation of popping down the Ventre de Paris and out at once into the not ungentle sewers, twisted, whirled + tumbled and at last being flung into the deadly stench, the rush and roar of the damned cloaca.
“A Personal Apologia,” Jan. 30, 1933 (LAC)