A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Speech (24 quotes)
In the first place, manuscript culture never made a sharp break with oral speech because everybody read manuscripts aloud.
“Culture without Literacy”, in Explorations #1, December (1953), p 120, reprinted in Essential McLuhan, (1995), p 306, additional reprint in Media Research Technology, Art and Communication (1997), p 130. and McLuhan Unbound #6, (2017)
Year: 1953
Oral speech is the articulation of that vague, terrifying ambience by which the ears of archaic man ensphere his being. It is by the visible spacing of pitches that he structures and controls the personal and interpersonal spaces of his world.
“Space, Time and Poetry” in Explorations 4, (1955), p 57, (2016) reprinted as McLuhan Unbound #13, (2005), p 9
Year: 1955
I am trying to find out some of the hidden bases of liturgy and popular speech and entertainment, since public worship and corporate speech and song are closely intertwined
Liturgy And Media” in The Critic, Vol.31, No. 3, January-February (1973), p 18, reprinted in reprinted in The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion (1999), p 122
Year: 1973
Actual speech is “stutter” and discontinuous.
“The Hardware-Software Mergers”, Speech at the conference, Reappraisal of the Educational Technology Industry, University of Chicago, November 16-18, 1969, Transcript, p 11
Year: 1969
Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space...it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the human dark.
Counterblast (1969), p. 13
Year: 1969
If it is asked, "What is the content of speech?," it is necessary to say, "It is an actual process of thought, which is in itself nonverbal." An abstract painting represents direct manifestation of creative thought processes as they might appear in computer designs. What we are considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes.
0Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 8
Year: 1964
[Man’s] collective consciousness or intuitive awareness is diminished by this technical extension of consciousness that is speech.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 79
Year: 1964
Drawn to McLuhan #6
If speech is indispensable as a mode of social action to the Australian bushman, it is infinitely more so to us who inherit the eloquence of Plato and St. Ambrose.
“Education of Free Men in Democracy: the Liberal Arts,” St. Louis University Studies in honor of St. Thomas Aquinas, Vol. 1, 1947, p 50
Year: 1947
Speech comes with the development of the power to let go of objects. It gives the power to detachment from the environment that is also the power of great mobility in knowledge of the environment. So it is with the growth of the idea of money as currency rather than commodity."
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 124
Year: 1964
“Such a state of collective awareness may have been the preverbal condition of men.”
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 80
Year: 1964
Speech is organized stutter.
In conversation with John Lennon, in The Beatles and McLuhan, John McFarlane (2012)
Year: 2012
Ireland is perhaps the only part of the English-speaking world where the oral tradition of culture has strongly persisted in spite of the printed page. And Ireland has given us Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Synge, and Joyce in recent years – all of them masters of the magic of the spoken word. A Ballynooley farmer who returned to Ireland from America said to his neighbor: “In three years I didn’t meet a man who could sing a ballad let alone compose one on his feet.”
“Sight, Sound and the Fury,” Commonweal, April 9, 1954, Vol. 60, No. 1, p 7
Year: 1954
The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 57
Year: 1964
[T]he whole British upper class mimic with voice the world of printing. This puts the lower classes way down because they still retain many of the characteristics of pre-print in their voices. So the class structure in England is quite simply simulating print with the voice.
From a recording McLuhan call to Tony Schwartz; recounted in Schwartz’s The Responsive Chord (1970), p 122
Year: 1970
But every word uttered by man requires a large measure of the poetic ability. Our words are analogies of the miracle by which we incarnate and utter the world.
“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:
Language
An immediate simulation of consciousness would by-pass speech in a kind of massive extrasensory perception, just as global thermostats could by-pass those extensions of skin and body that we call houses. Such an extension of the process of consciousness by electric simulation may easily occur in the 1960s.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge p 130
Year: 1964
I suggest that the spoken word is the indispensable medium for processing the non-verbal noises of the industrial environment. This brings us to a strange feature of the Engolish language which is not shared by other languagesl English is the only language that has feet as opposed to mere symbols. The iambic and trochaic feet of English (up-beat and down-beat) permits it to have a much deeper relation to movement and multi-sensuous involvement than other Western tongues.
“Jazz and Rock” (1976); unpublished typescript written for but not accepted by Rolling Stone magazine, p 3
Year: 1976
Chapter:
Music
Speech was the first ability which enabled men to rise from the brutishness in which they were sunk. The myth concerning Hercules that he tied men together by the ears was interpreted in the light of Christian revelation to mean that speech was the first restorer of society just as excellent speech is the bond of good society at all times.
“Education of Free Men in Democracy” (1943), p 48
Year: 1943
Speech is our principal means of structuring interpersonal distances. And these distances are not just physical, but emotional and cultural. We involuntarily raise our voices when speaking to those who do not understand our language.
“A Historical Approach to the Media” (1955), p 106
Year: 1955
[After a speed-reading of Milton’s “Paradise Lost”] And one of the boys, after reading the entire poem in seven minutes said, “I didn’t know Milton was such a great musician!” What came out of the poem at that speed was organ music. It was auditory. Read at a much slower speed Milton is a very visual poet. Read at high speed he became auditory. It’s like going through the sound barrier.
“Tuning In on Marshall McLuhan.” interview by Joseph Foyle, in This Week (Dublin, Ireland, 1972), typescript transcript, p 10
Year: 1972
[T.S.] Eliot is careful to point to the corporate, spoken language as "speech," and dialect," and "tribal," because these features of language are much beyond the range of the written or printed word.
Liturgy And Media” in The Critic, Vol.31, No. 3, January-February (1973), p 20, reprinted in reprinted in The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion (1999), p 126
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Eliot, T.S.
For various reasons, which we can discuss at length sometime, it is impossible to have a music that is not based on the rhythms of a particular tongue of speech. Speech is the “hidden” ground for the music as figure in any culture whatever. There are specific and complex reasons why the oral tradition of American Southern speech constitute the only possible ground for jazz and rock. Some of these reasons include the fact that English is almost the only language in the world that has actual feet and not mere syllables. Equally basic is the relation of English to the metropolitan patterns of industrial sound. New technological sounds and patterns are processed through the speech in order to become “music.” To people who do not understand this complex of speech technology factors, it must seem very mysterious that Chinese and Norwegian alike are compelled to sing Rock in English rather than their own tongues.
Letter to John Cage, September 13, 1972, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 456
Year: 1972
If you put on a corporate voice the moment you step outside it means that you put on the speech that belongs to your class. And we don’t do that. Therefore we don’t have a class system. Class has more to do with voice than it has to do with economics.
Carl Scharfe interview (1976), transcript p 4
Year: 1976
“McLuhan quoted a line from Eliot in mincing Eliotic voice to illustrate a McLuhan concept of English poetry that he called ‘a sensory bias of levelness, evenness… ‘The English used linearity in the equitone way to keep the mob back. It’s a strategy of self-defence.’”
Grace Glueck in the New York Times (date to come), reviewing the museum seminar headlined by Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker at the City Museum of New York, October, 1967; from William Buxton’s Introduction, The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, edited by William Buxton, published U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 12
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Eliot, T.S. | English Language