A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Viewing chapter Perception (8 quotes)
“THE FIRST THING IS TO ACQUIRE PERCEPTION. GAIN UNDERSTANDING THOUGH IT COST YOU ALL YOU HAVE.” (Proverbs 1:2)
Marshall McLuhan
Printed page inside a frame by the door to the seminar room at MM’s Centre for Technology and Culture coach house; his own translation/interpretation of the biblical verse, which is translated quite differently in most bibles.
Quote #5327
Chapter: Perception
The discovery that languages are not channels like the telegraph for little messages but basically forms of perception and association by perception has been a tremendous revolution in literature.
‘The Meaning of TV to Children’, 1965, p 2
Quote #5328
Year: 1965
Chapters: Language | Media as Form | New Criticism
Our sensory modes are constituents, not classifications. I am simply identifying modes of experience. 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. Most people look back for security. Much greater perceptions and energies are needed than simply mine in the world in which we exist. Better developed talents are needed. James Joyce had these talents in a much more refined state. Joyce had a complete ecology of manmade environments which these critics should have read and studied long ago.
“The Hot and Cool Interview”, in Essays Media Research Technology, Art, Communication, p 78
Quote #5329
…one of the principal developments of the past century or so has been the supplanting of linear perspective by a multi-locational mode of perception… [also called] a circulating point of view.
"Inside Blake and Hollywood." Sewanee Review Vol. 55, No. 4, October, 1947, p 710
Quote #5330
Year: 1947
Chapters: Linear and Nonlinear | Perspective, Point of View
Already the Freudian patterns of perception have become an outworn code that begins to provide the cathartic amusement of a game, rather than a guide to living.
Understanding Media, 1964 (MIT/Routledge edition), p 239
Quote #5331
Year: 1964
Chapter: Freud, Sigmund
Such extensions of our faculties have immediate effects on our habits of perception. This is called “negative feedback,” or learned responses to new situations. The photograph revolutionized the human image as much as it changed the patterns and spaces of our cities. Indeed, the photograph gave us a push in the direction of the programmed environment.
“The Emperor’s Old Clothes”,1966,p 92, reprinted in McLuhan Unbound #20 (2017), p7
Quote #5332
Year: 1966
Chapter: Photography
The poet here is exercising his priestly powers of purifying the wells of existence, exerting his primary imagination which is the agent of all perception, not the secondary imagination which brings art into existence as an echo of the functions of perception.
“Coleridge as Artist” (1957) in The Interior Landscape (1969), p 120
Quote #5333
Year: 1957
Chapter: Poetry
I think most artists are absolutely aghast at the world they live in, and they just wonder how it is possible for the world to be like that. And they never stop until they have shaped a pattern that explains why. They are incredulous. They simply say, “It couldn’t be. Nothing could be that amazing.”
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October 9-10, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 153
Quote #5334
Year: 1967
Chapter: Art, Artists

Drawn to McLuhan #11

Illustrated scene of four young people wearing VR headsets, striking playful dance poses in a cluttered tech office decorated with video game posters and whiteboards, with glowing sword and game icons floating around them.
"The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine readily masters the grim and the dumb."
Illustrated scene of two caricatured Cold War figures, Uncle Sam and a Soviet military officer, juggling televisions, computer monitors, and mobile devices while standing on opposite sides of a cracked, splitting cliff under a stormy sky.
"The bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images."
Illustrated classroom scene of a stern, glasses-wearing teacher handing back graded papers marked with red F's to worried students, with a speech bubble containing bold text above him.
"Stupidity is no excuse for not thinking."
Photorealistic portrait of a grey-haired man in a tweed suit standing in a wood-paneled library, resting his hand on an illuminated antique globe, looking toward the camera.
(McLuhan's thought in some else's nutshell phrasing) "All that you touch you change. / All that you change changes you. / The only lasting truth is change." Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower
Black-and-white ink illustration of World War II-era bomber crew loading bombs stamped with social-media-style icons (speech bubbles, "out," "T") into a plane's open bomb bay, with the bombs falling and exploding over a city below.
"Information, as such, is the new sinews of war."
Illustrated scene of a grey-haired man (McLuhan) speaking at a lectern on a stage before a seated audience, with a large speech bubble shaped like a rifle firing a starburst explosion.
"In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon."
Split illustration: left panel shows an aerial view of a geometric city intersection with rows of pedestrians walking in straight lines; right panel shows a man in a suit running diagonally across a field of black and grey polka dots.
"I do not move along lines. I use points like the dots in a wire-photo."
Wide illustrated panoramic timeline of human transportation history, divided into vertical panels showing a bare foot, a millstone, an ox cart, a rowed galley ship, a covered wagon, a horse-drawn carriage, an early automobile, a propeller airplane, and a rocket launching into space.
"All invention is a form of bodily fission, with the ensuing chain reactions in the body and in the environment."
Retro illustrated comic-style scene of a bespectacled, grey-haired professor (McLuhan) lecturing in a classroom before two students, a looping electrical cord running from his open mouth to a large blank speech bubble plugged into a wall outlet.
"A McLuhanism … consists perhaps simply in tying an unexpected circuit … it's a form of circuitry."
Dark illustration of a row of silhouetted people looking down at glowing smartphones, with colorful swirling light trails connecting their phones upward to an image of planet Earth above them.
"When information moves at electric speeds the world of trends and rumors becomes the real world."
There’s a phrase of James Joyce. “Who gave you that numb?” Every name is a numb because it ends tension. When you have labelled something, perception flickers out. You have classified it and that’s the end of perception.
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October, 1967 , edited by William Buxton, U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 169
Quote #5335
Year: 1967
Chapters: Joyce, James | Names, Naming
© The Estate of Marshall McLuhan