A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Viewing chapter Unconscious (32 quotes)
The instant and total character of electronic information dispersal tends to extend, not consciousness, but the subconscious.
“The New Morality” (1967), p 175
Quote #7184
Year: 1967
Indeed, with the advent of electric technology we have entered a relatively dim, unconscious world in which the extension of everybody’s nerves has involved them deeply in all other lives. And while this has threatened the sense of identity of many people, it has heightened the general awareness of the shape and meaning of lives and events to a level of extreme scrupulosity.
"Essay”, for Dot Zero, 1964, pp 2-3
Quote #7185
Year: 1964
Even a restricted consciousness is far more interesting than the unconscious profound.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), 245
Quote #7186
Year: 1962
Chapter: Corporate
The unconscious is the world in which everything happens at once; in our unconsciousness, there’s no time structure. Everything is simultaneous; everything that ever happened to our race is simultaneous. Now, in our electronic environment – information environment – everything that ever happened is out there now, and is retrievable now. All the events, all the happenings are out in our electronic world simultaneously; this gives them an archetypal, unconscious character…..
“Love,” Saturday Night Magazine, February, 1967
Quote #7187
Year: 1967
Chapters: Environment | History | Simultaneity
This is not to make value judgments. Donne, the medievalist, is oral, active, aggressive and engages the reader in the same restless role. Browne, the charming humanist, is a master at cultivating the gentle reader, playing up his whimsical personality as a principal component in his entertainment.
“Printing and Social Change”, 1959, pages 17-18
Quote #7188
Year: 1959
The new environment – completely invisible compared to the old one – is the human unconscious.
“Information Hunt Looms Big” (1967), p 6
Quote #7189
Year: 1967
We actually live in a world environment that now has the structure of our own subconscious lives.
"The Future of Morality: The Inner vs. the Outer Quest", in Dunphy, ed., The New Morality” (1967), p 176
Quote #7190
Year: 1967
Chapters: Consciousness | McLuhanisms & Zingers | Retribalizing | Today’s Transition

Drawn to McLuhan #7

Illustration of a young girl blowing out a cake covered with far more lit candles than her stated age, under a "Happy 8th Birthday!" banner, surrounded by cheering children and wrapped gifts.
“We live years ahead of our thinking.”
Illustration of a man in a "YAY ME!" hoodie holding cash, suspended and controlled like a marionette by strings attached to a giant grinning money-bag figure overhead, cheered on by a large crowd.
“The man of great wealth in the new information world is a puppet employee of his own wealth.”
Illustration of an ornate gold picture frame containing a headless figure in a navy suit and red tie standing before draped curtains, with an engraved plaque below.
“The irrational has become the major dimension of experience in our world.”
Stylized photo-illustration of a jazz quintet (trumpet, saxophone, upright bass, piano, and drums) performing on a dim stage, with colorful glowing sound waves swirling around the instruments.
“Jazz is a survival strategy for people harassed by cacophony.”
Comic-style illustration of a man with an eyepatch peering fearfully from inside a wooden shack while a long line of identical men wearing dark sunglasses and carrying white canes march past outside.
“In the land of the blind the one eyed man is a hunted criminal.”
Illustration of a lone hiker with a walking stick standing at the edge of a smoking volcanic crater on a rocky mountain trail, with a peaceful green village valley visible in the distance beyond the clouds.
“For our problems, like our means and opportunities, are of a scope beyond those of any previous age.”
Painterly illustration of two seagulls swooping and diving through looping, ribbon-like flight trails against a blue-to-orange sunset sky, framed by large quotation marks.
“Conversation is, for me, something like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a game in which you play all sorts of nose-dives and air-tumbles.”
Illustration of a teenage girl taking a selfie in her bedroom, whose walls are covered edge to edge with dozens of Polaroid-style photos of friends and family.
BEST QUOTES INDIVIDUAL AND TRIBE
Illustration of a young woman with a long braid sitting on a park bench in a leafy park, anxiously looking at her phone with a speech bubble showing a text message about keeping a relationship secret from her parents.
“And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside.”
In the electric world, everything is the unconscious. We have created the unconscious outside of ourselves as an environment.
“Education in the Electronic Age” (1970), p 7
Quote #7191
Year: 1970
There is no connection between the elements in an electric world, which is equivalent to being surrounded by the human unconscious.
“McLuhan on Marketing”, in Executive, April, 1967
Quote #7192
Year: 1967
Anyhow, Darwin broke up anthropocentric consciousness just as Copernicus had done for space. Yet till Freud, man somehow clung to some scrap of intuition of consciousness as tinged by spontaneity. But Freud ended that by his image of mind as ripple on the ocean of unconsciousness.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 251
Quote #7193
Year: 1962
Chapter: Corporate
That is to say, the intellectual is no longer to direct individual perception and judgment but to explore and to communicate the massive unconsciousness of collective man.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 269
Quote #7194
Year: 1962
Chapter: Corporate
If the unconscious has an important and irreplaceable function in human affairs, we had best look to it – it is being eroded at furious pace; it is being invaded by dazzling investigations and insights; and we could quickly reach a stage in which we had no unconscious. This would be like dreaming awake.
“Technology and Environment”, in Arts Canada, No. 105, February, 1967, pp. 5-7; original typescript, p 2
Quote #7195
Year: 1967
Today, our inner life is itself a world of simultaneous relationships. The subconscious, the dream world, is a world wherein we possess all past knowledge of the race. We possess it all simultaneously, and of this we’re completely unconscious because you can’t be conscious of the simultaneous.
“Understanding Canada and Sundry other matters: Marshall McLuhan “interview in Mademoiselle Magazine, January (1967), p 114
Quote #7196
Year: 1967
When we put our nerves outside we can only survive by anaesthesia. And so we live in the unconscious. This is the age of the unconscious because it is the age when the nervous system is totally exposed. And if people go unconscious you can only reach them through the unconscious, and it would seem to be an inevitable fact that if you are going to deal with people who are in a trance you are going to have to talk to them in the language of dreams. I think we are for this reason a somnambulist population.
“Prospect” (1962), p 366
Quote #7197
Year: 1962
The unconscious is a store of everything at once. When you begin to move information electrically, you begin to create a subconscious outside. Until recently, the conscious was our environment; now the subconscious has become our environment.
“Understanding Canada and Sundry other matters: Marshall McLuhan “interview in Mademoiselle Magazine, January (1967), p 114
Quote #7198
Year: 1967
Until a technology has existed long enough to permeate social psyche and sensorium, people cannot really live with it. That is why innovation creates violence. The human image is so disturbed by new sensory adjustments that the new service environments can be said to be also disservice environments.
Introductory essay, PRINT, 1970
Quote #7199
Year: 1970
[To W.H. Auden:] ...our new culture, in this century … pushed the unconscious up into the private psyche, destroying private identity.
TV Panel with W.H. Auden and Buckminster Fuller, 1971, transcript: 12:00
Quote #7200
Year: 1971
TV experience favors much more consciousness concerning the unconscious than do the hard-sell forms of presentation in the press, the magazine, movie, or radio.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 228
Quote #7201
Year: 1964
Technologies tend to be unconscious as much in their origins as in their effect. A new technology enjoys a brief reign as an anti-environment, then it becomes environmental in turn.
Letter to Jonathan Miller, January 8, 1965, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 315
Quote #7202
Year: 1965
Chapter: Technology
Now, in tribal society there is no unconscious. It’s only the visual man, the highly literate man, who carefully stuffs things into his unconscious. The tribal man has everything up in his consciousness.
“Speaking Freely”, interview with Edwin Newman on WNBC-TV, December 27, 1970, transcript, p 912
Quote #7203
Year: 1970
The Unconscious is a world where everything happens at once, without any connections, without any reasons at all. We're making the outside world just as crazy and mixed-up as our own. Unconscious has always been.
“LOVE”, in Saturday Night Magazine, February 1967
Quote #7204
Year: 1967
This possibility that we are actively engaged in liquidating the unconscious for the first time in history, behooves us to pay some attention to how it is structured and to what function it serves in human affairs. It may prove to be indispensable to sanity.
“The Invisible Environment: The Future of an Erosion”, Perspecta, Vol.11, (1967), p 165, reprinted in On the Nature of Media, (2016), p 115
Quote #7205
Year: 1967
In the contemporary world the unconscious is being retrieved and brought up into daylight awareness. This is done for both private and corporate psyche.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 5
Quote #7206
Year: 1970
If the unconscious is an environment for consciousness, is not consciousness in some sense an environment for the unconscious? Is sleep a means of merging these two environments so that one can reprocess the other? An excessive activity in either consciousness or the unconscious would result in insomnia?”
“Letter to John Culkin, September 17, 1964”, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), pp 309-310
Quote #7207
Year: 1964
Technologies would seem to be the pushing of the archetypal forms of the unconscious out into social consciousness.
“Letter to John Culkin, September 17, 1964”, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 309
Quote #7208
Year: 1964
Chapter: Consciousness
The unconscious, just because it is an all-at-once world of everything that ever was, now becomes technologically environmental. We can now have outside ourselves everything that men ever were or know or experienced, simultaneously.
“Information Hunt Looms Big” (1967), p 6
Quote #7209
Year: 1967
Chapters: Dropout | History | Living Unity
We have become intensely aware of the dimensions of the unconscious. We seem to be devoted to dispelling the unconscious through dealing with it was Columbus dealt with the new world – opening it up as fast as possible and exploiting its as fast as possible – Madison Avenue-wise or otherwise. Our whole time seems to be pushing toward the extending of consciousness into unconscious areas.
“The Meaning of TV to Children” (1965), p 36
Quote #7210
Year: 1965
…can we not say that in every field the drive is toward pushing back the unconscious in favour of extending the frontiers of human awareness…
“A New Journey for the Magi” (1965), p 11
Quote #7211
Year: 1965
However, our fascination with all phases of the unconscious, personal and collective, as with all modes of primitive awareness, began in the eighteenth century with the first violent revulsion against print culture and mechanical industry. What began as a "Romantic reaction" towards organic wholeness may or may not have hastened the discovery of electromagnetic waves. But certainly the electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous "field" in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a "global village." We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums. So that concern with the "primitrive" today is as banal as nineteenth-century concern with "progress," and as irrelevant to our problems.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 31
Quote #7212
Year: 1962
Chapter: Consciousness
Just as our forefathers stripped forests and top soils, recent generations have been engaged in on the frontiers of consciousness, stripping away the ancient growths of the collective unconscious.
“The Future of the Unconscious” part of an unpublished series on the futures of varied themes, titled Mosaic, 1974, p 1
Quote #7213
Year: 1974
Chapter: Consciousness
In this century we have reached awareness of the unconscious itself as a major hidden resource available for the commercial and political manipulation of consciousness.
“Media and the inflation Crowd” (1973), in Marshal McLuhan: The Man and the Message (1989), p 62
Quote #7214
Year: 1973
Chapter: Consciousness
Jung developed his essay on the unconscious on the theory that the people of this world are asleep.
“Genius or Whimsy? Some McLuhanisms”, in Saturday Post of Canada, May 13, 1979, p 13
Quote #7215
Year: 1979
Chapters: Consciousness | Jung, Carl G | Sleepwalkers
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