A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Religion (33 quotes)
Faith is not a matter of concepts, it's percepts, a matter of immediate reality.
“Genius or Whimsy?” 1979
Year: 1979
Chapter:
Rear View Mirror
Whenever you meet the unfamiliar, you at once translate it into something you already know, and that means you never contact the unfamiliar. It's not safe.
“Understanding Canada and Sundry other matters: Marshall McLuhan” interview, in Mademoiselle Magazine, January (1967), p 114
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Rear View Mirror
For reasons that have never been explained, concentration on the preceding social environment, accompanied by an inability to notice the new environment, has been characteristic of our history.
“Electronic Man and the End of the Neolithic Age” (1965), p 1
Year: 1965
Chapter:
Rear View Mirror
[Fear can exert] ...a fascinated withdrawal of perception from the new constitutive forces together with a panicky concern for the receding configurations. Such is the significance of the Goldwater mood and the rhetoric of Ayn Rand.
“Guaranteed Income in the Electric Age” (1968), p 75
Year: 1968
As our technology begins to tackle the light barrier, our concepts hobble toward the challenge of the archaic oat-barrier.
“The Electronic Age -- the Age of Implosion” (1962), p 201
Year: 1962
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
The iron whim of history, that all awareness of change must be retrospective, could well prove to be a very miserable fate for our time.
“Prospect of America” (1962), p 108
Year: 1962
Chapter:
Rear View Mirror
On the flight deck of a jet liner the rear-view mirror is not consulted, and the astronaut does not have a point of view.
“The New Morality”, 1967, p 177
Year: 1967
Ecumenism? Why it's really another name for Marconi.
United Church Observer, Nov. 15, 1966
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Living Unity
Until 1700 more than 50 per cent of all printed books were ancient or medieval. Not only antiquity but also the Middle Ages were given to the first reading public of the printed world. And the medieval texts were by far the most popular.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 171
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Rear View Mirror
The television environment has steadily upgraded the old movie forms into sentimentally valued art forms. The medieval world got the same treatment from the Gutenberg technology.
The Emperor's Old Clothes, 1966, p 92
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Rear View Mirror
The rearview mirror is the foreseeable future.
Review of Books and Religion, 1974, p 15
Year: 1974
Chapter:
Rear View Mirror
When one looks in the rear-view mirror, what one sees is not the back-seat driver so much as the car or truck coming up behind you. In other words, the rear-view mirror presents a picture of the "foreseeable future."
Conf on Info Management Systems, 1974, p 12
Year: 1974
Chapter:
Future
Camp is popular because it gives people a sense of reality to see a replay of their lives.
Chatelaine interview, 1967, p 90
Year: 1967
"Camp" is not a form of retrieval but rather simply rear-view-mirror nostalgia. It is not a new service environment or cliche but a means of escaping into the gingerbread world of Mom and nursery.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 189
Year: 1970
Chapter:
LOM 3 – Retrieve
What kind of people were we? You know this crazy passion of the adopted child now to find out who his parents were? That's the same mentality -- a demand to have it all here now to look at, again. That questing backwards in time is an instant technique, straight out of TV.
“Media in the 70s: A Dialog with Marshall McLuhan”, in Videography, October (1977), pp 64-65
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Rear View Mirror
when people have been stripped of their private identities they develop huge nostalgia, and nostalgia for the jeans and levis of the young today are nostalgia for grand-dad's overall.
Monday Conference, 1977, p 8 of their transcript
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Rear View Mirror
I think I would buy the older pictures that I have seen or known of when I was a youngster, simply because the habit of revisiting, of going through something again, is more interesting than for the first time, of course.
Q and A with McL, Take On, Nov-Dec, 66 p 7
Chapter:
Rear View Mirror
Paramount Studios or Disneyland or Univeral City were, and are vast reservoirs of mobile city sets for any age or culture. These are “disposable cities” such as we associate with world fairs and Expo since 1851 and the Crystal Palace. It is typical of the 19th century mind of the current [city] “planners” that they should consider the mobility problem in terms of the obsolete car and truck and train. In the mobster phrase of the 20’s, they have chosen us as eligible for the “cement kimono” treatment.
Letter to the Editor, Globe and Mail, March 12, 1970 [LAC]
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Programming the Environment
All contemporary decision making confirms the habits of the past in reacting with a futile attempt to adjust. Reaction is the age-old attempt to adjust to the old, which is seen as “present” and “future.” At instant speeds all reaction and adjustment are inevitable, too late to be relevant. To keep up we must be far ahead.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 216
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Advice
We live probably in the most religious age that has ever existed.
“Electric Consciousness and the Church” (1979), p 1
Year: 1979
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
Apartments in a high-rise building are a little repeat-repeat-repeat module that create exactly the form that Andy Warhol called mini-art. When you repeat the apartment form hundreds and hundreds of times in a small space, such as these high rises, you really switch into tribal or cave world. And these people, therefore – I hadn’t realised it really until we sat here a few minutes ago – these people in these new types of cave dwellings really depend upon electric information for their existence.
Electric elevators, electric telephones, electric TV, electric radio. Without these electric services, this sort of cave world would be impossible.
Appearance on W5, CTV, 1969
Appearance on W5, CTV, 1969
Year: 1969
These essential aspects of liturgical change were neither predicted nor programmed, and they remain unnoticed by the users of church resonance. I make no value judgments in this regard. I merely suggest that these results come from a typical visual Western mentality as it approaches technological innovation
"Liturgy and Media: Third conversation with Piere Babin" from Autre homme, autre chrétien å I'åge électronique,Lyon: Editions du Chalet,(1977), reprinted in The Medium and The Light (1999) P 144
Year: 1977
"It is written but I say unto you," seems to express our Lord's attitude toward the scribes and the Pharisees. These masters of the written word had great difficult in hearing the New Word.
“The Future of Morality” (1967), p 175
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Oral
I have never failed to thrill at the words in the Mass, "mirabilitur condidisti mirabilius reformasti" -- man who had been amazingly and wonderfully made before the Fall was even more wonderfully remade at the Incarnation. The theology on this subject is mostly lacking. There isn't any.
“McLuhan Dazzles Graduates”, 1969, p 29
Year: 1969
Human perception is literally incarnation.
Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters” The McAuley Lectures: Christian Humanism in Letters, Saint Joseph College, West Hartford Connecticut, (1954), p 63, reprinted in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 169.
Year: 1954
Chapter:
Senses
Perhaps the besetting Catholic danger is to live with the truth until one is not concerned to look at it. We know it so well that we "couldn't care less."
Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters” The McAuley Lectures: Christian Humanism in Letters, Saint Joseph College, West Hartford Connecticut, (1954), p 65, reprinted in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 25 & 172
Year: 1954
Chapter:
Catholic Church
The confusion which exists at present, as between private or corporate dress for religious, may herald the advent of a time when all religious will become the underground.
“International Motley and Religious Costume” (1972), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 77
Year: 1972
St. Paul's remark that faith comes by hearing would seem to have something to do with his resonance of the word, the word, the divine word, resonating in the human heart is a kind of interface which changes the human heart, and tunes in a totally new way and so, the idea of resonance rather than logical connectedness, or logical demonstration and a mere sequence of proofs one following in other rigorously, the idea of resonance as simultaneous and total and all involving, and demanding everything, but we have and in turn feeding us and feeding back to us everything we need.
“A Matter of Faith,” TV interview with Father Patrick Peyton (1972), transcript, p
Year: 1972
The electronic media…return us to the unified field of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought….
Tyuonyi, published1985
Year: 1985
In an instantaneous world there is no past, because all the pasts are present... thus ecumenism is a pattern which now extends to every form of political and social life on the planet. It is not something that characterizes the Church as such.
Contribution to Spectrum of Catholic Attitudes, 1969, p 138
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Catholic Church
It is thus the mystery of ecumenism that by creating much more involvement it also places more stress on diversity and uniqueness and autonomy.
Contribution to Spectrum of Catholic Attitudes, 1969, p 139
Year: 1969
[T]he interface between the ethereal world of the information environment. .. and the mystical body, opens a new frontier in church history which is... trackless and opaque.
“The Papal Interval” (1969), typescript, p 5
Year: 1969
I would say it is a very wide open question whether the Greek or Roman church has any future at all as a Greek or Roman institution. It would be a good time to be Russian orthodox: they split off from Rome because it was too literate. The Eastern church is an "ear" church; Rome was always very far on the visual road to visual power.
“Future church” (1977), p 8
Year: 1977