A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Planet, Nature (34 quotes)
I’m pretty safe, I think, in saying that the future of investment on this planet is going to be overwhelmingly the restoration of the planet itself through all the phases of its development.
“Information Hunt Looms Big” in College and University Journal, Vol 6, No. 2, Spring, 1967, p 6
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Propaganda
The planet is now contained inside a man-made environment and has become an archeological museum in itself. The planet is a campus.
“Communism Hard and Soft,” Dewline newsletter 1.6, August, 1969, unnumbered first page
Year: 1969
Once surrounded by human artefacts, Nature is a mess.
Letter to Jinm Coutts, Secretary of Pierre Elliottt Trudeau, March 2, 1970, in Been Hoping We Might Meet Again: the Letters of Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Marshall McLuhan, edited by Elaine Kahn (2019), p 81
Year: 1970
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
A planet parenthesized by a man-made environment no longer offers any directions or goals to nation or individual. The world itself has become a probe. “Snooping with intent to creep” or “casing everybody else’s joint” has become a major activity. As the main business of the world becomes espionage, secrecy becomes the basis of wealth, as with magic in a tribal society.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 12
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Surveillance
The satellite surround is the new artistic mask worn by the earth itself.
“Innovation Is Obsolete”, in Evergreen Review, Vol. 15, No. 90, June (1971), p 48
Year: 1971
The effect of satellites is the conversion of the planet into a global theatre that demands spectacular programming beyond anything conceived by the old Hollywood. The global theatre demands the world population not only as audience but as cast of participants.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 18
Year: 1972
The sociological approach to the human environment began with Sputnik in 1957. So far, society has meant hardware, and supplies, and quantification of things and people. Now the time is ripe to scan the software environment, the planetary surround of electric information and its effects on the diverse populations of the globe.
“When the West Goes East and the East Goes West,” unpublished one page typescript dated January 6, 1977.
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Hardware / Software
Drawn to McLuhan #4
Shakespeare at the Globe had seen all the world as a stage, but with Sputnik, the world literally became a global theater with no more audiences, only actors.
“The End of the Work Ethic” (1972), in Understanding Me, p. 197
Year: 1972
When Sputnik went up on October 4, 1957, it put the planet inside a manmade environment for the first time. Spaceship Earth has no passengers, only crew. Sputnik transformed the planet into Spaceship Earth with a programmed problem. Ecology became the name of the game from that moment on. Nature ended. The planet became an art form inside a manned capsule, and life will never be the same on this planet again. Nature ended and art took over. Ecology is art.
“Living in an Acoustic World,” Public Lecture at the University of South Florida, 1970. “Marshall McLuhan Speaks” Transcript, p 11
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Ecology
You cannot put a satellite environment around a planet without altering the planet and the occupants of the planet. Their whole vision of themselves, their body percepts. their corporate social percepts, are entirely altered by a satellite environment. That does not mean that they ever have to notice the satellite. They never have to give it a thought. It never has to occur to them that there is such a thing as a satellite, in order for the satellite to make total changes in the comings and goings and patterns of their daily lives.
“Education in the Electronic Age”, in Interchange, Vol 1, No 4, 1970, pp 1-2
Year: 1970
We’re going to lovingly and with the utmost regard to archeology and history, we’re going to reconstruct every phase of this planet as it was originally. It’s going to take a lot of money from the foundations, I’m afraid, in the next… (Audience laughter) But the whole planet is going to be restored to a sort of Garden of Eden status. The climate will be adjusted to what it properly was at this or that time, and all kinds of artistic developments are to be programmed. It also points to the fact that one of the strange developments is that the human environment itself can be dealt with as an art form.
Videorecorded lecture, “Joyce and T(hunder)elevision”, 1966, transcript, p 6
Year: 1966
When you scrap nature, then everything looks like pollution, including nature. When you go into spaceship Earth, anything that is not programmed is pollution. I am using Barbara Ward’s phrase: ”spaceship earth.” The spaceships were the first totally programmed human environments. You had to take “nature” with you if you were going to leave this planet. We have thus learned how to program environments totally. When you begin to program the total human environment it is like restoring a ruined Rembrandt. All the previous tinkerings look like defacements.
“The Hardware-Software Mergers: How Successful Have They Been?” Speech given at conference, Reappraisal of the Educational Technology Industry, University of Chicago, November 16-18, 1969. Transcript, p 5
Year: 1969
The services rendered to ecology by the dinosaur suddenly ended when the dinosaur achieved vasta bulk. As the dinosaur became an environment, he eased to accommodate to the existing world. He became pollution and ended. Today the truck and the motor car have long passed the point where their services exceed their disservices in the Western world.
“High-Rise Inverts Everybody into Nobody,” essay written for the NY Times, never published; 1972 typescript, p 1
Year: 1972
“Nature” has thus been mask and performance for the West (since the Greeks) until the hydrogen bomb recalled us to the existential ground. Concern for existenz marks the end of many centuries of Nature.
“Roles, Masks and Performances” (1971), p 523
Year: 1971
It was Kant who first drew attention to Newtonian physics as an artistic fiction for the manipulation and control of nature. Since his time it has become normal to reverse this process and to see works of art in the same mode as scientific concepts and discoveries.
Review of Paul Klee (1953), p 79
Year: 1953
Chapter:
Living Unity
The services rendered to ecology by the dinosaur suddenly ended when the dinosaur achieved vast bulk. As the dinosaur became an environment, he ceased to accommodate to the existing world. He became pollution and ended. Today the truck and the motor car have long passed the point where their services exceed their disservices in the Western world.
“Everybody Into Nobody”, in New York Times (1972), p E 11
Year: 1972
When environmental noise increases to the point of becoming figure, does noise pollution begin?
“Training perception”, in City as classroom, p 13
Why have people recently become conscious of noise pollution?
“Training Perception”, in City as classroom, p 13
Check the laws on noise control in your own area. Find out whether they can be enforced. Is the figure under attack in the polluted surround, or the ground? When the surround is man-made, does the nature of pollution change? Would an earthquake create noise pollution? How does an earthquake differ from a jet breaking the sound barrier?
“Traininerception”, in City as classroom, p 13
The Idols of the Tribe, and Vice's first axiom, specify the general bias of sensibility, such as the suppression of the right hemisphere by the alphabet or that of the left by radio and TV, as a pollution of exact observation which must be allowed for.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 84
Year: 1988
We are entering a time of dialogue and heightened human awareness that plagues many as the specter of "pollution." The etymology of this word (from Latin pro-luere: wash forth) reveals a hidden process that is entirely applicable to the present situation: pushed to extreme, dilution becomes pollution. It is like the rich Texan: whenever he cashed a check, the bank "bounced."
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 5
Year: 1972
The new expert, along with the old executive, has been swept away in a flood of comedies. New environments of information and enterprise have revealed the contours of these obsolescent types, even as the satellite has created a sudden and universal awareness of "pollution”.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 23
Year: 1972
Inflation Is Pollution: The Dilution of Promises
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 79
Year: 1972
The Effluent Society: Pollution of Human Satisfactions
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 101
Year: 1972
Whereas mere headings were once specialist, mechanical catchalls, they now become the avenues of insight into complex organic processes. An obvious example is pollution. It has always been a major feature of any environment. At high information speeds it presents a Gorgon-like and intolerable visage. It is no longer a category or nuisance, but a process that turns societies to stone.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 106
Year: 1972
The planet has become a work of art since the satellite, i.e. the planet in the sense of “Nature” has been scrapped and we now confront it as an art project in the name of “pollution.” Once surrounded by human artefacts, Nature is a mess.
“Been Hoping We Might Meet Again”, p 81
Pollution is another form of taking over of an entire service environment, whether of land, water, or air and perverting its uses.
“Been Hoping We Might Meet Again”, p 87
Please explain why you think (or don’t think) that the impeachment of R. N. is going to purify democratic politics and “restore integrity” to Government, and how this will help us control inflation, pollution, repair the breach with NATO, etc.
“Been Hoping We Might Meet Again”, p 108
You ask also about inflation and pollution and the breach with NATO, etc. I have an unpublished paper in which I try to explain that inflation also is the encounter of incompatible worlds, the clash between the old commodity markets and the new money, or information markets.
“Been Hoping We Might Meet Again”, p 110
Society was a hostile and polluted realm into which the men made forays and from which they returned with loot. Their women were to be ·kept pure from this commercial pollution.
“Out of the Castle into the Counting-House”, in Politics: a monthly review (1945), p 277
Year: 1945
The extension of the metaphor knocked down the walls of his castle at once. The pollutions of the outside world were now inside his home. Notice all the beasts that inhabit the imagination of Lewis' Carroll's Alice. Freud merely completed the "pollution" of the English-man's castle.
“Out of the Castle into the Counting-House”, in Politics: a monthly review (1945), p 279
Year: 1945
Henceforth, until Darwin and Freud peopled it with beasts and perverts, the Englishman's home was his castle. There, the pollutions he encountered and perpetrated outside the pale of its cloistral purity, would have no place. At least, not until he suddenly began, like Alice, to dream of the beasts within its walls.
“Footprints in the Sands of Crime”, in The Sewanee Review, Vol. 54, # 4 (1946), p 627-628
Year: 1946
The universal fact of pollution and the universal acceptance of ecology are complementary creations of service environments that stepped up their effects to the level of extreme disservices.
“Innovation is obsolete”, in Evergreen, Vol. 15, # 90 (1971), p 49
Year: 1971
Chapter:
Ecology
All art must begin with the effect, just as the effect is to be "followed" by the causes. What we now call pollution is simply accepting the effects before noting the causes, a luxury we can no longer afford. We have now to learn to take today as including past and future.
“Understanding McLuhan--and fie on any who don't,” in The Globe and Mail (1973), p 7
Year: 1973