A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
Β©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Viewing chapter Sleepwalkers (24 quotes)
In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is not a king, he’s a hunted criminal.
TV Interview with Edmund Carpenter, 2011, transcript 57:52
Quote #6408
Year: 2011
Chapter: McLuhanisms & Zingers
Determinism is the result of the behaviour of those who are determined to ignore what is happening around them.
Letter to the Editors of Life magazine, March 1, 1966, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 334
Quote #6409
Year: 1966
Chapters: McLuhanisms & Zingers | Media Effects
The transforming power of media is easy to explain, but the ignoring of this power is not at all easy to explain. 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 #6410
Year: 1964
Chapters: Advice | Between Two Ages | Electric, Electronic | From Tribal to Literate | Marx, Karl | Media Effects | Narcissus, Denial of Media Effects | Radio | Today’s Transition
But the favorite stance of literary man has long been β€œto view with alarm” or β€œto point with pride,” while scrupulously ignoring what’s going on.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 199
Quote #6411
Year: 1964
Jung developed his essay on the unconscious on the theory that the people of this world are asleep.
β€œGenius or Whimsy? Some McLuhanisms”, in Saturday Post of Canada, May 13, 1979, p 13
Quote #6412
Year: 1979
Chapters: Consciousness | Jung, Carl G | Unconscious
[P]eople have never, in any age…known what they were doing, that is, what the effects would be of what they were doing…
First Fordham Lecture (1967), in Understanding Me (2002), p 144
Quote #6413
Year: 1967
Chapters: Mastering Technology | Media Effects | Rear View Mirror
…we still cannot free ourselves of the delusion that it is how a medium is used that counts, rather than what it does to us and with us. This is the zombie stance of the technological idiot.
Playboy Interview, (1969), in Essential McLuhan (UK edition, 1997), p 228
Quote #6414
Year: 1969
Chapter: Narcissus, Denial of Media Effects

Drawn to McLuhan #2

Two-panel comic illustration of a boxing match: a humanoid figure made of tumbling alphabet letters wearing "BRECE" shorts faces off against a muscular boxer with a smartphone for a head, under a "LITERACY VS ELECTRONIC" ring sign; in the second panel the smartphone boxer knocks the letter-man apart with a "K.O." punch.
β€œIt may even prove to be the case that the entire tradition of phonetic writing, which is co-extensive with our Western world and the Graeco-Roman tradition, cannot sustain the electronic impact.”
Illustrated period scene of a man in early-1900s suit and cap stepping into a Ford Model T outside the "Biograph Theatre" marquee advertising "The Artful Dodger," with a thought bubble above showing rows of parked cars at an outdoor movie screening.
β€œNew means create new goals.”
Illustrated interior of a rustic coffee shop with several patrons seated separately, each connected by small thought-bubble trails to one large shared blank thought bubble overhead, suggesting wordless, intuitive communication.
β€œThe future of language presents the possibility of a world without words, a wordless, intuitive world, like a technological extension of the action of consciousness.”
Illustration set in a lush jungle showing a feather-adorned Indigenous tribesman facing a translucent glowing green humanoid figure whose body is composed of streaming binary code.
β€œThe new electronic man and pre-literate man see eye to eye.”
Stylized line-art illustration of an elevated highway with a bright yellow central lane sweeping up into a sharp architectural peak, flanked by a modern city skyline of glass skyscrapers.
β€œThe road is our major architectural form.”
Illustration of a cluttered living room where a mother holds a baby on a couch surrounded by several children, most staring blankly at an unseen glowing television screen while a teenager scrolls a phone.
β€œWe are not the true parents of our children.”
Illustrated lineup of warriors and soldiers spanning history left to right β€” an Indigenous fighter, Roman legionaries, a medieval knight, WWI and modern soldiers, a futuristic armored figure, and an astronaut on the moon β€” set against a backdrop of fire, smoke, and space.
β€œWe put on our technology as evolutionary clothing.”
Comic-style illustration of a robed orator gesturing dramatically from a pedestal, his speech rendered as a jumbled speech bubble of scrambled Greek letters, while an assistant arranges the same letters into ordered puzzle pieces spelling Greek words like "ΑΑΕ΀Η" and "Ξ”Ξ™ΞšΞ‘Ξ™ΞŸΞ£Ξ₯ΝΗ" on a scroll.
β€œWriting is the spatialization of thought.”
The YouTube logo: a red rounded rectangle with a white play-button triangle beside the black "YouTube" wordmark on a black background.
[With electronic media, we are building] β€œβ€¦a new tribal encyclopedia of auditory incantation”
All dimensions are enigmas to a blindfolded consciousness.
Untitled, unpublished essay prepared for the Los Angeles Times, 1969, typescript p 6 (LAC)
Quote #6415
Year: 1969
Chapters: McLuhanisms & Zingers | Wake Them Up!
When a new problem becomes greater than the human scale can cope with, the mind instinctively shrinks and sleeps. Today, for the first time, things happening at the speed of light can illuminate even the inveterate human somnambulism, forcing pattern recognition and intelligibility on the most reluctant.
β€œIdentity, Technology and War,” U.S. Catholic/Jubilee, January, 1970, p 37
Quote #6416
Year: 1970
Chapters: He’s Hopeful | Human Scale | Pattern Recognition | Wake Them Up!
But ads are carefully designed by the Madison Ave. frogmen-of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure. Their mere existence is as testimony, as well as a contribution, to the somnambulistic state of a tired metropolis.
Understanding Media (1963), MIT/Routledge, p 229Β 
Quote #6417
Year: 1963
Chapter: Wake Them Up!
β€œThe products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way theyΒ are used that determines their value." That is the voice of the current somnambulism. Suppose we were to say, "Apple pie is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value." Or, "The smallpox virus is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value."
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 11
Quote #6418
Year: 1964
Chapter: Wake Them Up!
Tranquilizers and anesthetics, private and corporate, become the largest business in the world just as the world is attempting to maximize every form of alert.
From ClichΓ© to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 13
Quote #6419
Year: 1970
Chapter: Anticipating Change
Today, for the first time, things happening at the speed of light also illuminate even the inveterate human somnambulism, forcing pattern recognition and intelligibility on the most reluctant. β€œ
Letter to Edward T. Hall, July 23,1969, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 383
Quote #6420
Year: 1969
Chapters: He’s Hopeful | Human Scale | Pattern Recognition | Wake Them Up!
Daniel Boorstin's The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream is an interesting documentation of the somnambulist literary demand for matching as a criterion of integrity.
From ClichΓ© to Archetype with Wilfred Watson, 1970, p 138
Quote #6421
Year: 1970
Chapters: Matching and Making | Wake Them Up!
In a period of rapid change, you have to wake up. We are all sleepwalkers, but when you're changing from one element to the other, you must be completely awake.
Quoted by B.W. Powe, β€œMcLuhan: the Put-On,” in A Climate Charged (1984), p 22
Quote #6422
Year: 1984
Chapter: Anticipating Change
The radical deficiency of American intellectual life vis-a-vis the new tasks of revaluation, synthesis, and exploration, is its lack of communal sense. This is true even of the academic scene. But outside the academic world there is certainly no likelihood of finding the leisure, the erudition or the disinterestedness for the work at hand. The first step, therefore, is to perform a basic overhaul job on the academies. To redirect the energies of the American college from the immediate goal of preparing students for a local commercial society to preparing students for the fullest kind of citizenship, such as is actually demanded of us as a condition of present survival β€” that is the task.
From McLuhan’s 1947 Proposal to Robert M. Hutchins, to launch an interdisciplinary seminar and associated journal (later, accomplished narrowly by the Ford Foundation Grant with the Explorations groups and the journal Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication)
Quote #6423
Year: 1947
Chapters: Training of Perception | Wake Them Up!
Source: https://mcluhansnewsciences.com/mcluhan/2017/06/proposal-to-robert-hutchins-1947
No college, business or city is run by human persons anymore. I have yet to meet someone who knows what he was doing let alone why he was doing it. Universal Abdication of the human motive is now plain. How to tackle the situation? Zombies. Sleep-walkers. Can't argue with such. They agree with anything you say and go on. Mark that as the present feature. No more disagreement.
Letter to Ezra Pound, July 30, 1948, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), pp 198-199
Quote #6424
Year: 1948
The "censor" protects our central system of values, as it does our physical nervous system by simply cooling off the onset of experience a great deal. For many people, this cooling system brings on a lifelong state of psychic rigor mortis, or of somnambulism, particularly observable in periods of new technology
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 24
Quote #6425
Year: 1964
Chapter: Wake Them Up!
The only form of response that people in general ever make to anything is a numb, somnambulistic response. They do whatever happens to come into their heads – like tulips.
β€œAn informal interview with Marshall McLuhan β€œ, by Linda Sandler, In Miss Chateleine, Fall Fashion Issue, (1974), p 82, quoted in Marchand, Marshall McLuhan The Medium and the Messenger (1989), p 229
Quote #6426
Year: 1974
Chapter: Wake Them Up!
Decent and well-meaning people, acting as if in corporate somnambulism, are engaged today in abortion centres the patterns of life processing which worked so well in meat packing and death camps.
β€œAbortion in Today’s World: Marshall McLuhan’s View,” in John C. Wilke, Abortion Handbook (1971) p 137
Quote #6427
Year: 1971
Chapter: Wake Them Up!
No college, business or city is run by human persons anymore. I have yet to meet someone who knows what they are doing let alone why .... Abdication of the human motive is now plain. How to tackle the situation of zombie and sleepwalkers. You can't argue, they agree and move on. There is no more disagreement. We are, like Hitler, "somnambulists" – sleepwalkers
Letter to Ezra Pound, July 30, 1948, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 198
Quote #6428
Year: 1948
Today, for the first time, things happening at the speed of light also illuminate even the inveterate human somnambulism, forcing pattern recognition and intelligibility on the most reluctant.β€œ
Letter to Edward T. Hall, July 23,1969, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p 383
Quote #6429
Year: 1969
Chapters: He’s Hopeful | Human Scale | Pattern Recognition | Wake Them Up!
Naturally, this method dictates what shall be studied. If I have a point of view about the human condition as a result of investigating the effects of media, it is simply that people are somnambulist.
Letter to Frank Kermode, March 4, 1971, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p 426
Quote #6430
Year: 1971
Chapter: McLuhan on McLuhan
MEANS CREATE ENDS FOR THE SOMNAMBULIST
ENDS CREATE MEANS FOR THE ENTREPRENEUR
MEANS BECOME ENDS FOR THE BUREAUCRAT
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 194
Quote #6431
Year: 1972
Chapter: Wake Them Up!
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