A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Viewing chapter Memory (12 quotes)
The real job of the computer is not retrieval but discovery. Like the human memory, the process of recall is an act of discovery.
Hot & Cool Interview (1967), reprinted in Essays Media Research (1997), p 71
Quote #4739
Year: 1967
Chapter: McLuhanisms & Zingers
… we use our memories for many purposes, mostly unconscious. When you can recall things at a very high speed they take on a new mythic and structural meaning that is quite alien to ordinary perception. So the computer… has, in spite of itself… revealed the knowledge of the mythic pattern, structures and profiles, all of which are quite excitedly loaded with discovery.
“Diebold Discussion Forum” with McLuhan and Mike Wallace (1966), published version of transcript, pages 8-9
Quote #4740
Year: 1966
Chapters: Computer | Future | Predictions
In the past, what lovers went to bed with was a kind of memory. A racial memory which included intimations of vast poetic meetings in the mists of time and all kinds and sorts of mythical and poetical and beautiful things – maybe all that was in the back of the mind. All the poetry, Dante and the rest. But when we replaced the memory of a desire, or the desire of a memory with a chart, love became baseball – all scoring and length of orgasm.
“Love,” Saturday Night, February, 1967
Quote #4741
Year: 1967
Chapter: Sex and Love
Further, the peculiar character of jazz derives from the South, perhaps because of the interplay between industrial and metropolitan life, on one hand, and agrarian life, on the other. People situated on the frontiers between metropolitan and agrarian cultures are naturally inclined to interplay them. The sounds of the city can be poured through the spoken idiom in such areas.
“Mr. Eliot and the St. Louis Blues,” 1974, The Antigonish Review
Quote #4742
Year: 1974
Blake makes quite explicit that when sense ratios change, men change. Sense ratios change when any one sneer or bodily or mental function is externalized in technological form:
The Spectre is the reasoning Power in Man, & when separated
From Imagination and closing itself as in steel in a Ratio
Of the things of Memory, It thence frames Laws & Moralities
To destroy Imagination, the Divine Body, by Martrydoms & Wars.
“Inside Blake and Hollywood”, in Sewanee Review, Vol.55, No.4, October, (1947),p 710; reprinted in McLuhan Unbound (2003), p 6
Quote #4743
Year: 1947
Chapters: Imagination | Senses
A worldwide network of computers will make all of mankind’s factual knowledge available to students everywhere in a matter of minutes or seconds. Then, the human brain will not have to serve as a repository of specific facts, and the uses of memory will shift. In the new education, breaking timeworn, rigid chains of memory may have greater priority than forging new links. New materials may be learned just as were the great myths of past cultures – as fully integrated systems that resonate on several levels and share the qualities of poetry and song.
“Learning in the Global Village” with. George Leonard (1969), in Radical School Reform. Visions: The School in Society …reprinted from 1967-MarshalI_McLuhan_and_George B Leonard The Future of Education on The Class of 1989 Look, v21 N….
Quote #4744
Year: 1969
Chapters: Computer | Predictions
Vico was the first to spot language itself as a memory theatre. Finnegans Wake is such a memory theatre for the entire contents of human consciousness and unconsciousness.
Letter to William Jovanovich, Dec. 1, 1966, in Letters, 1987, p 339
Quote #4745
Year: 1966
Chapters: Joyce, James | Language

Drawn to McLuhan #10

Black-and-white illustrated diptych with a bold headline banner, featuring pen-and-ink style portraits of two men (labeled George Meredith and James Joyce) each with a speech bubble of quoted text and a caption giving their names, nationalities, and life dates.
“What he said of others was often true of himself.” On George Meredith: “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.” On James Joyce: “For Joyce has solved numerous problems which science has not yet formulated as problems.”
Photorealistic image of a grand library hall with a sign reading "Robo-losophers," lined with curtained booths labeled with names of philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, etc.), each containing a robotic/statue figure, while students converse in the aisle.
“The means that are destroying our tradition, our culture, and values, could be used to preserve and sustain them.”
Color illustration of an oversized, glowing television set surrounded by a dense field of empty speech bubbles and broken eggshells, with small crowds of people gathered below on either side.
“The advent of TV may carry us beyond speech altogether.”
Color cartoon illustration of a pilot and a woman eating at an airport café table, the woman saying in a speech bubble that the pilot “said to the pilot, ‘Knock knock’…”, with an airliner and ground crew visible through the window.
“Our time has discovered that there is a language of Forms and Gestures – a language which has its own grammar and syntax.”
Color cartoon illustration of scientists in lab coats dancing amid laboratory equipment, one exclaiming in a speech bubble about subatomic particles, in a particle physics lab set.
“Science and magic have married each other.”
Photorealistic image of an older man laughing heartily at the head of a seminar table, surrounded by smiling students, in front of a blackboard in a book-lined classroom.
“I want a career where I get to laugh a lot.”
Color illustration of an older, bespectacled man in a tweed jacket seated at a cluttered writing desk in a book-lined study, scratching his head while writing, with a copy of "Understanding Media" stacked nearby.
“I don’t pretend to understand my stuff. After all, my writing is very difficult.”
Color illustration of dejected, unemployed-looking people sitting on a city sidewalk holding cardboard signs ("MBA Was Useless," "College Degree $0 Return"), while a line of business-suited robots carrying briefcases walks past in the background.
“How much more Know-How is needed to make human life obsolete?”
Color illustration of a bespectacled man in a suit with three overlapping, motion-blurred heads (as if spinning), pointing toward a spinning desk globe encircled by ribbons labeled "Global Village" and "Medium Is the Message."
“Globes make my head spin. By the time I’ve located the place, they’ve changed the boundaries.”
Photo composite of two "hear no evil, see no evil" style classical marble busts (Plato covering his ears, Aristotle covering his eyes) beside a sepia-toned portrait photograph of an older man in a suit resting his chin on his hand, with a speech bubble of quoted text above them and name captions below.
“Why has no one in history — not Plato, certainly not Aristotle, no philosopher, ever regarded our technologies grammatically, asking how they inflect on us?”
When our world exists only in fantasy and memory, the natural strategy for identity is nostalgia, so that today revivals occur so frequently that they are now called “recurrences” (in the recording industry).
“A Last Look at The Tube,” unpublished article written for New York Magazine, New York Magazine, Vol. 11, No. 14, 17 March dated March 17, 1978, in original typescript, p 3; reprinted in McLuhan: the Man and His Message (1989)
Quote #4746
Year: 1978
Chapters: Identity | LOM 3 – Retrieve
Print provided a vast new memory for past writings that made a personal memory inadequate .
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 158
Quote #4747
Year: 1964
Chapter: LOM 1 - Enhance or Amplify
The Golden Bough is a memory theatre of the corporate rather than the private conscioiusness and marks a major transition toward the retribalizing of the human consciousness.
Letter to William Jovanovich, Dec. 1, 1966, in Letters, (1987), p 339
Quote #4748
Year: 1966
Chapter: Retribalizing
The English can never remember and the Irish can never forget;
The adult never remembers but the child never forgets;
The Israelis can never remember and the Arab can never forget;
People never remember but the computer never forgets.
Counterblast (1969), p 69
Quote #4749
Year: 1969
Chapter: McLuhanisms & Zingers
In order to think, you have to forget most of what you are experiencing in order to relate it to earlier things you know, otherwise you can’t infer anything from what you are seeing. So, at the speed of light, which is now the normal speed of most information, on TV, radio, telephone and so on – at the speed of light the need to forget becomes a form of nostalgia.
Maclean’s, March 7, 1977; quoted by William Toye in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 177
Quote #4750
Year: 1977
Chapters: Advice | Speedups
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