A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
Β©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Viewing chapter Radio (22 quotes)
Between cinema and television we managed to squeeze in radio, the mechanization of speech.
β€œTechnology and Political Change,” International Journal, Vol 7, No. 3, Summer, (1952), p 193
Quote #5931
Year: 1952
Radio transforms the relation of everybody to everybody, regardless of programming.
Essential McLuhan (1995), p 274
Quote #5932
Year: 1995
In order to restrict radio-listening to national programs, some Arab governments have passed a law forbidding the use of private headphones, in effect enforcing a tribal collectivism in their radio audiences.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 215
Quote #5933
Year: 1964
Radio provided the first massive experience of electronic implosion, that reversal of the entire direction and meaning of literate Western civilization. For tribal peoples, for those whose entire social existence is an extension of family life, radio will continue to be a violent experience. Highly literate societies, that have long subordinated family life to individualist stress in business and politics, have managed to absorb and to neutralize the radio implosion without revolution. Not so, those communities that have had only brief or superficial experience of literacy. For them, radio is utterly explosive.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 300
Quote #5934
Year: 1964
FDR, the cripple, in his wheelchair was an emperor, a tribal chieftain who created new environments. Like Uncle Sam, he wore the whole public as his mask. FDR used radio as the firing line in World War I.
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 56
Quote #5935
Year: 1970
For Africa, India, China, and even Russia, radio is a profound archaic force, a time bond with the most ancient past and long-forgotten experience.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 301
Quote #5936
Year: 1964
Telegraph and radio neutralized nationalism but evoked archaic tribal ghosts of the most vigorous brand.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 301
Quote #5937
Year: 1964

Drawn to McLuhan #6

Three-panel comic illustration of a vintage tube-radio-style robot wrapping a woman in strips of punched ticker tape printed with algorithmic text, with a close-up of the text-covered tape and a final panel of the woman standing beside the robot.
β€œWith computers we are taped typed and scrubbed.”
Two-panel cartoon: in the left panel a man in overalls repairs a disassembled humanoid robot on a workbench; in the right panel the now-functional robot welds metal while the man, startled, carries a box of parts away.
β€œWe make our tools and our tools remake us.”
Sketch-style illustration of three figures β€” a young woman with a backpack, a man in a blue jacket, and an elderly man with a cane β€” walking away down a country road in different directions, looking back over their shoulders.
β€œWe look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
Split illustration: an office scene with a locked "Suggestions" box and potted plant beside a doorway, leading into an industrial room where a worker in a yellow hazmat suit and gas mask uses tongs to feed a paper into a glowing furnace.
β€œThe idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.”
Illustration of human hands and robotic hands collaboratively assembling and sanding a wooden triangular frame (resembling an impossible/Penrose triangle) on a workbench covered with tools, screws, and blueprints.
β€œThe future work of mankind is to achieve relevance.”
Stylized illustration of four vintage guitar cases leaning against a brick wall beside a "Stage Entrance" sign and band posters reading "Hollow Notes" and "Folk."
β€œThe future of consciousness is already assuming a very different pattern, a very different character.”
Colorful cartoon illustration of a diverse crowd of people singing, dancing, and playing instruments (guitar, violin, drum) together along a tree-lined city park path.
β€œSound, in this new world of dance and song, is not for listening, it’s for making.”
Cartoon illustration of a man in a suit walking down a hallway toward three doors marked with male, female, and a half-blue/half-orange question-mark restroom symbols.
β€œSex as we now think of it may soon be dead.”
Comic-style caricature of a wild-haired pianist in a tuxedo mid-performance at a grand piano, mouth wide open with piano-key teeth, one hand raised and the other holding a concert program, an audience visible in the background.
β€œMine is a transformation theory: how people are changed by the instruments they employ.”
Satirical oil painting in an ornate gilded frame depicting a shirtless man on a rearing horse against a mountain steppe landscape, styled as classical equestrian portraiture, with a nameplate on the frame.
"It is a characteristic of all social processes that they become manifest and conspicuous at the moment of their demise."
Cartoon illustration of two robots seated in a futuristic control room, monitoring screens labeled "Live Gum Interaction," "Wrigley Consumption," and other real-time metrics, with a pair of hands unwrapping a stick of gum shown on a central display.
β€œEach stick of gum we reach for is acutely noted by some computer that translates out least gesture into a new probability curve.”
Radio is provided with its cloak of invisibility, like any other medium. It comes to us ostensibly with person-to-person directness that is private and intimate, while in more urgent fact, it is really a subliminal echo chamber of magical power to touch remote and forgotten chords.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 302
Quote #5938
Year: 1964
Radio had a fantastic and profound effect in retrieving the ordinary tribal consciousness of Germany in the twenties and thirties. TV, which is an addictive inner trip (regardless of program), sent American youth in pursuit of the occult and group awareness. Since there are no visual or quantifiable connections between radio and TV and their effects, Western man humbly and dumbly submits to their magic.
β€œViolence of the Media”, in Marshall McLuhan: The Man and his Message (1989), p 94
Quote #5939
Year: 1989
Chapters: Oft-Cited Quotes | Television
The American negro is a mini-state first created by radio and jazz.
from β€œThe Mini-State and the Future of Organization,” Dewline newsletter, Vol 1, number 8, February, 1969, unpaginated
Quote #5940
Year: 1969
So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 305
Quote #5941
Year: 1964
Given only the sound of a play, we have to fill in all of the senses, not just the sight of the action. So much do-it-yourself, or completion and "closure" of action, develops a kind of independent isolation in the young that makes them remote and inaccessible. The mystic screen of sound with which they are invested by their radios provides the privacy for their homework, and immunity from parental behest.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 303
Quote #5942
Year: 1964
Chapter: Hot & Cool
All that has ever appeared on the retinal screen of mankind over the centuries is old movies. (Newsweek, Feb 28, 1966)
Newsweek, February 28, 1966
Quote #5943
Year: 1966
Chapters: Dropout | McLuhanisms & Zingers | Rear View Mirror
We live in a time when whole people have gone out of their wits when impelled by the new massive forms such as radio. Psychologists explain that when the field of attention has a centre without a margin we are hypnotized. Such is the condition of tribal man, past and present.
β€œInside the Five Sense Sensorium” (1961), p 54
Quote #5944
Year: 1961
Chapter: Tribal Societies
One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system. News bulletins, time signals, traffic data, and, above all, weather reports now serve to enhance the native power of radio to involve people i n one another. Weather is that medium that involves all people equally. It is the top item on radio, showering us with fountains of auditory space or lebensraum.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 298
Quote #5945
Year: 1964
Chapters: Media Reprocess Media | Media Study | Television
The power of radio to retribalize mankind, its almost instant reversal of individualism into collectivism, Fascist or Marxist, has gone unnoticed. So extraordinary is this unawareness that it is what needs to be explained. The transforming power of media is easy to explain, but the ignoring of this power is not at all easy to ex- plain. It goes without saying that the universal ignoring of the psychic action of technology bespeaks some inherent function, some essential numbing of consciousness such as occurs under stress and shock conditions.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 304
Quote #5946
Year: 1964
Chapters: Advice | Between Two Ages | Electric, Electronic | From Tribal to Literate | Marx, Karl | Media Effects | Narcissus, Denial of Media Effects | Sleepwalkers | Today’s Transition
FORSDALE: Back to radio. I’m a kid walking down the street and I’ve got a transistor radio right up to my earβ€”
MCLUHAN: You’re wearing several masks, one on top of the other. Kids love this sense of power. They’re putting on English, putting on the radio network, putting on the game they’re listening to, putting on music. The put-ons can be stacked layer upon layer, each resonating on the other. You’ve got to consider a lot of the meanings of β€œput on” here, and note that you can both put people on and also β€œtake them off.”
β€œTechnology and the Human Dimension: Marshall McLuhan and Louis Forsdale”, in Marshall McLuhan: the Man and His Message (1989), p 13
Quote #5947
Year: 1989
You can turn on or β€œput on” radio, or you can β€œgo on the air” or you can get β€œradio coverage” ( a kind of clothing) as a service, and you can also β€œput on” the illusion of an invasion of Mars, as Orson Welles did for us. It was terrifying!
β€œTechnology and the Human Dimension: Marshall McLuhan and Louis Forsdale”, in Marshall McLuhan: the Man and His Message (1989), p 13
Quote #5948
Year: 1989
The pains that F.D.R. spent on adjusting his image for a radio audience were not misspent. He understood that the radio medium put ht President in an entirely new relation to the governed – a relation quite different from that created by the press. Indeed, he was at great paints to use an unfavourable press to enhance his radio image.
��”Public and Private Sectors in the Electronic Age,” 1964, p 5
Quote #5949
Year: 1964
Chapters: Media Reprocess Media | Politics and Government
If you wanted to study radio as a medium in its impact on society, you would do well to look at what happens to radio in a movie. What use is there made of radio in the movie, because the form is then translated into another medium and some of its characteristics are high-lighted. What happens to a telephone in a Broadway play? What use is there made of telephone in drama which tells you a lot about the telephone?
β€œThe Electronic Revolution in North America”, 1959, p 10
Quote #5950
Year: 1959
Chapters: Media Reprocess Media | Questions He Asks
Radio will serve as background-sound or as noise-level control, as when the ingenious teenager employs it as a means of privacy.
Understanding Media 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, pp 311-312
Quote #5951
Year: 1964
…the human heart-throb put on a PA system provides a well of loneliness in which anyone can drown.
β€œFive Sovereign Fingers Taxed the Breath”, in Shenandoah The Washington And Lee University Review, Vol. VII, No. 1, Autumn (1955), p 52, reprinted in Explorations 4, (1955), p 33 , Explorations in communication: an anthology (1960), p 208, Also appears in alternative format as part of Verbi-Voco-visual Explorations, (1967), Counter Blast (1969), p 17, Essential McLuhan (1995), p 211
Quote #5952
Year: 1955
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