A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Viewing chapter Money (33 quotes)
As money is transformed into software, it undergoes strange transformation.
“The Social Impact of the Computer” (1979) Unpublished Typescript, p 2
Quote #4753
Year: 1979
Today, as the new vortices of power are shaped by the instant electric interdependence of all men on this planet, the visual factor in social organization and in personal experience recedes, and money begins to be less and less a means of storing or exchanging work and skill. Automation, which is electronic, does not represent physical work so much as programmed knowledge. As work is replaced by the sheer movement of information, money as a store of work merges with the informational forms of credit and credit card. From coin to paper currency, and from currency to credit card there is a steady progression toward commercial exchange as the movement of information itself.
Understanding Media (1964) MIT/Routledge edition, p 137
Quote #4754
Year: 1964
Cash money and the compass, leading technologies of the fifteenth century, illustrate early figure-ground transformations of visual space archetypes to the acoustic, from the tangible to the intangible, from hardware dominance to software dominance—analogous to the present role of the computer. Current shift from visual space to acoustic space technologies in society is accelerating.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers, 1989, p 35
Quote #4755
Year: 1989
Chapters: Figure/Ground | Today’s Transition
Money is obsolete because it stores work (and work, as we have seen, is itself obsolete). In a work-less, non-specialist society money is useless. What you need is a credit card, which is information.
“The Agenbite of Outwit”, In Location Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, (1963), p 121, reprinted in Marshall McLuhan Essays Media Research: Technology Art Communication, (1997), p 125
Quote #4756
Year: 1963
Chapter: LOM 2 - Obsolesce
When a thing is current, it creates currency; fashion creates wealth by moving textiles and making them ever more current. This process we have seen at work in the section on "Money."
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, pp 154-155
Quote #4757
Year: 1964
Chapters: Dropout | Fashion | Living Unity | McLuhanisms & Zingers
Since all media are extensions of ourselves, or translations of some part of us into various materials, any study of one medium helps us to understand all the others. Money is no exception.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 139
Quote #4758
Year: 1964
Chapter: Media Study
Money as a social medium or extension of an inner wish and motive creates social and spiritual values, as happens even in fashions in women's dress.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 135
Quote #4759
Year: 1964

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?”
People of promise, and promising enterprises, like promissory notes, have become inseparable from the promises of promotion and advertising itself. Money in turn is a promise to pay promises, and the plausible con man has returned as the stand-in for the traditional gentleman.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 79
Quote #4760
Year: 1972
Chapter: Management
Like any other medium, [money] is a staple, a natural resource. As an outward and visible form of the urge to change and to exchange, it is a corporate image, depending on society for its institutional status.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 133
Quote #4761
Year: 1964
"Time is money" and money is the store of other people's time and effort.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 127
…money is a language for translating the work of the farmer into the work of the barber, doctor, engineer or plumber.
Understanding Media (1964) MIT/Routledge, p 127
Quote #4762
Year: 1964
Conformity to this fashion literally gives currency to a style or fabric, creating a social medium that increases wealth and expression thereby. Does not this stress how money, or any medium whatever, is constituted and made efficacious?
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 135
Quote #4763
Year: 1964
Chapter: Fashion
….one obvious cause of inflation is the media-made consciousness of it. Everybody feels impelled either to grab some advantage or to take defensive action by direct intervention at the practical level.
“Media and the Inflation CROWD,” NY Times, 1973, in MM The Man and His Message, p 60
Quote #4764
Year: 1973
Chapter: Media Effects
The mere interrelating of people by selected information is now the principal source of wealth in the electric age. In the preceding mechanical age, work had not been like that at all. Work had meant the processing of various materials by assembly-line fragmentation of operations and hierarchically delegated authority. Electric power circuits, in relation to the same processing, eliminate both the assembly line and the delegated authority. Especially with the computer, the work effort is applied at the "programming " level , and such effort is one of information and knowledge. In the decision-making and "make happen" aspect of the work operation, the telephone and other such speed-ups of information have ended the divisions of delegated authority in favor of the "authority of knowledge." It is as if a symphony composer, instead of sending his manuscript to the printer and thence to the conductor and to the individual members of the orchestra, were to compose directly on an electronic instrument that would render each note or theme as if on the appropriate instrument.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, pp 263-264
Quote #4765
Year: 1964
Chapters: Authority of Knowledge | Management
Money was never devised for electric speeds of transactions.... [and] cannot persist indefinitely as a monolithic, uniform system of quantified data...
Guaranteed Income--, 1968., pp 79-80
Quote #4766
Year: 1968
Currency is a way of letting go of the immediate staples and commodities that at first serve as money, in order to extend trading to the whole social complex.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 132
Quote #4767
Year: 1964
Money, which had been for many centuries the principal transmitter and exchanger of information, is now having its function increasingly transferred to science and automation.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 142
Quote #4768
Year: 1964
The instantaneous creates an interplay among time and space and human occupations, for which the older forms of currency exchange become increasingly inadequate.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 138
Quote #4769
Year: 1964
Money, like writing, has the power to specialize and to rechannel human energies and to separate functions, just as it translates and reduces one kind of work into another.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 136
Quote #4770
Year: 1964
Since all media are extensions of ourselves, or translations of some part of us into various materials, any study of one medium helps us to understand all others. Money is no exception.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 139
Quote #4771
Year: 1964
Chapter: Media Study
The role of money is enormously increased after money begins to foster specialism and separation of social functions. Money becomes, in effect, the principal means of interrelating the ever more specialist activities of literate society.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 138
Quote #4772
Year: 1964
Prose is private drama / Poetry is corporate drama.
One-page sheet of one-liners given to Gerald Feigen (n.d.)
Quote #4773
[Money is a corporate image, depending on society for its institutional status.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 125
Quote #4774
Year: 1964
[T]he market... has become increasinely diaphanous as information and credit replace specie and bullion.
“Yestertomorrow of the Book” (1972), p 16
Quote #4775
Year: 1972
If the GNP has become an obsolete tool, it is another way of saying that it has just begun to penetrate the entire system. It has become the national icon.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 234
Quote #4776
Year: 1972
What disqualifies war from being a true game is probably what also disqualifies the stock market and business -- the rules are not fully known nor accepted by all the players.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 240
Quote #4777
Year: 1964
The market serves as feedback, but also as translator and concealer of the effects of the business.
“LOG for Chantacler,” undated typescript (pre-1960), p 1
Quote #4778
Year: 1960
Whereas the labour market offered the private services of individuals to corporate enterprises, the stock exchanges offered corporate services of public enterprises to private individuals.
“Inflation Crowd” (1973), typescript, p I0
Quote #4779
Year: 1973
When a thing is current it creates currency

Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 154
Quote #4780
Year: 1964
Chapter: McLuhanisms & Zingers
Money is a poor man's credit card.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 131
Quote #4781
Year: 1964
Money, as a social means of extending and amplifying work and skill in an easily accessible and portable form, lost much of its magical power with the coming of representative money, or paper money.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 134
Quote #4782
Year: 1964
Money, like language a store of work and experience, acts also as translator and transmitter.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 134
Quote #4783
Year: 1964
The nature of people demands that most of them be engaged in the most frivolous possible activities—like making money.
“An Informal Interview with Marshall McLuhan”, in Miss Chatelain (1974), page number not indicated in the LAC copy
Quote #4784
Year: 1974
Chapters: McLuhanisms & Zingers | Satirist
Even today, money is a language for translating the work of the farmer into the work of the barber, doctor, engineer, or plumber. As a vast social metaphor, bridge or translator, money – like writing – speeds up exchange and tightens the bonds of interdependence in any community… In a highly literate, fragmented society, “Time is money”, and money is the store of other people’s time and effort.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 136
Quote #4785
Year: 1964
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