A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Viewing chapter Present [The] (24 quotes)
We happen to live in a time of speeded up information, when we can have access to the past so easily, that there really isn't a past, it's all present and the present has become so rich and so complex and terrifying, that people do all they can to hide from it
“The Technological Unconscious,” First Lecture, Fordham, 1967, transcript p 3
Quote #5670
Year: 1967
Chapter: Predictions
The present has become so rich and so complex and terrifying that people do all they can to hide from it.
“Opening lecture, Fordham University” (1967), in Understanding Me (2003), p 141
Quote #5671
Year: 1967
However, to live in the present, or to take today now, involves acceptance of the entire past as now, and the entire future as present. Science fiction doesn't really measure up to the everyday reality because the real has become fantastic.
“The End of the Work Ethic” (1972), in Media Research (1997), p 103
Quote #5672
Year: 1972
Chapters: McLuhanisms & Zingers | Predictions
Today with electronics we have discovered that we live in a global village, and the job is to create a global city, as center for the village margins. The parameters of this task are by no means positional. With electronics any marginal area can become center, and marginal experiences can be had at any center. Perhaps the city needed to coordinate and concert the distracted sense programs of our global village will have to be built by computers in the way in which a big airport has to coordinate multiple flights.
Letter to Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, December 23, 1960, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 278
Quote #5673
Year: 1960
Chapters: Advice | Predictions
When computers are properly used, in fact, they are almost certain to increase individual diversity. 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 the 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.” - “The world communications net, the all-involving linkage of electric circuitry, will grow and become more sensitive. It will also develop new modes of feedback so that communication can become dialogue instead of monologue. It will breach the wall between "in" and "out" of school. It will join all people everywhere. When this has happened, we may at last realize that our place of learning is the world itself, the entire planet we live on. The little red schoolhouse is already well on its way toward becoming the little round schoolhouse.
“The Future of Education” with George Leonard, Look Magazine. Feb. 21, 1967, pp. 23-25.
Quote #5674
Year: 1967
Chapters: Computer | Dialogue | Inner/Outer
The world communications net, the all-involving linkage of electric circuitry, will grow and become more sensitive. It will also develop new modes of feedback so that communication can become dialogue instead of monologue. It will breach the wall between "in" and "out" of school. It will join all people everywhere. When this has happened, we may at last realize that our place of learning is the world itself, the entire planet we live on. The little red schoolhouse is already well on its way toward becoming the little round schoolhouse. 
“The Future of Education” with George Leonard, Look  Magazine. Feb. 21, 1967, pp. 23-25. 
Quote #5675
Year: 1967
Chapters: Computer | Dialogue | Inner/Outer
[Someday we may see] …a kind of computerized ESP, with consciousness as the corporate content of the environment – and eventually, maybe even a small portable computer, about the size of a hearing aid, that would process our private experience through the corporate experience, the way dreams do now.
From a lecture at Spencer Memorial Church in NYC in spring of 1965, reported in “The Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, May 15, 1965, p 44
Quote #5676
Year: 1965
Chapters: After Language | Computer | Corporate Consciousness | Extending Consciousness | From Tribal to Literate | Occult | Predictions

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?”
…symbols are not just referential signs. They don’t just say something. They do something. And saying is also symbolic action. We are moving very rapidly today to a grasp of scriptural, poetic and social communication which promises to take up all the wealth of patristic insight and to go far beyond it. But we have no choice. We have either to surpass any previous age or to collapse into a new Babel.
“Symbolist Communication,” a review of A Reading of George Herbert by Rosemond Tuve in Thought, Autumn (1952), p 457
Quote #5677
Year: 1952
Chapter: Analogy
PLAYBOY: Are you talking about global telepathy?
McLUHAN: Precisely. Already, computers offer the potential of instantaneous translation of any code or language into any other code or language. If a data feedback is possible through the computer, why not a feed forward of thought whereby a world consciousness links into a world computer? Via the computer, we could logically proceed from translating languages to bypassing them entirely in favor of an integral cosmic unconsciousness somewhat similar to the collective unconscious envisioned by Bergson.
Playboy Interview (1969), in The Essential McLuhan (1995), p 262
Quote #5678
Year: 1969
Chapters: After Language | Predictions
Earth in the next century will have its collective consciousness lifted off the planet’s surface into a dense electronic symphony where all nations – if they still exist as separate entities – may live in a clutch of spontaneous synaesthesia, painfully aware of the triumphs and wounds of one another.
The Global Village, 1989, with Bruce Powers, p 95
Quote #5679
Year: 1989
Chapter: Predictions
If we raised the visual intensity or the visual component of the TV image, it might serve enormously to ease the transition from the old mechanical age to the electronic age.
“Our Dawning Electric Age”, 1965, p 17 
Quote #5680
Year: 1965
Chapter: Television
What it will mean to be a boy or girl, man or woman, husband or wife, male or female, may come as one of the greatest surprises the future holds for us.
“The Future of Sex” with George B. Leonard for Look magazine, 1967, typescript, p 2 
Quote #5681
Year: 1967
Chapter: Sex and Love
In an unspecialized world of computers and all-enveloping communications, sensitive intuition and openness will win more prizes, if you will, than unfeeling simplistic logic.
“The Future of Sex” with George B. Leonard (1967) in On the Nature Of Media (2016), p 136
Quote #5682
Year: 1967
Chapters: McLuhanisms & Zingers | Playfulness | Sex and Love
Any phrasemaking yokel can become a world center.
“Oracle of the Electric Age,” Life magazine, February 28, 1966, pp 91-99
Quote #5683
Year: 1966
Chapter: McLuhanisms & Zingers
The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.
The Gutenberg Galaxy : The Making of Typographic Man , (1962), p 18
Quote #5684
Year: 1962
Chapter: Eye vs Ear
The present has become so rich and so complex and terrifying that people do all they can to hide from it.
“Opening lecture, Fordham University” (1967), in Understanding Me (2003), p 141
Quote #5685
Year: 1967
When we have stretched instant electronic webs around the globe, all the cultures of the world, past and present, become simultaneously accessible. The world becomes a museum without walls.
“The Crack in the Rearview Mirror”, in McGill Journal of Education (1966, Spring), p 32
Quote #5686
Year: 1966
Chapter: Education
Electric speeds tends to abolish time and space in human awareness. There is no delay in the effect of one event upon another. The electric extension of the nervous system creates the unified field of organically interrelated structures that we call the present Age of Information.
“The Role of the Media in Social Change” (1964), p 1
Quote #5687
Year: 1964
Chapter: Electric, Electronic
This is what T. S. Eliot calls "tradition" in his celebrated essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Eliot's concept seemed quite revolutionary in 1917, but it was in fact a report of an immediate and present reality. Awareness of all-at-once history or tradition goes with a correlative awareness of the present as modifying the entire past.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 257
Quote #5688
Year: 1968
Chapter: Eliot, T.S.
Such a duality of attitudes suggested to T. S. Eliot that past, present, and future exist as one thing: time considered as sequential (left hemisphere) is figure and time considered as simultaneous (right hemisphere) is ground.
The Global Village, with Bruce Powers (1989), p 10
Quote #5689
Year: 1989
Chapter: Eliot, T.S.
[W]e cannot know the present or the new except by creating the most ingenious devices. When Perseus wanted to confront the Gorgon he used a mirror. The mirror of art has been for Western man the prime means for confronting the present.
Speech at the U Texas-Stanford Symposium, 1966, taken from typescript, later appeared as a printed essay in The Meaning of Commercial Television, ed., Stanley Donner (1966)
Quote #5690
Year: 1966
Chapter: Environment
As we push our electric technology it will flip/open in the form of corporate consciousness. The present interim is baffling because it has a closed character, with which we know not how to deal. An electric system is very much like a small tribal society—that is, ecological and homeostatic.
Letter to John I. Snyder, Jr., August 4, 1963, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 291
Quote #5691
Year: 1963
Chapters: Between Two Ages | Chiasmus, Flips, Reversals | Corporate Consciousness | Ecology | Extending Consciousness
Electrically, [man’s] total history is now potentially present in a kind of simultaneous transparency which Joyce calls “heliotropic nighttime.”
War and Peace in the Global Village, 1968, pages 177-178
Quote #5692
Year: 1968
Chapter: History
Chronology – we value chronology. In the present age you can have access to all the ages that ever were, at any instant you want. You don’t have to wait for chronology anymore, and that goes for the future as well as the past.
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, U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 169171
Quote #5693
Year: 1967
Chapters: History | Linear and Nonlinear
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