A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Viewing chapter Writing (23 quotes)
The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 202
Quote #7457
Year: 1962
The MECHANIZATION of writing mechanized the visual-acoustic metaphor on which all civilization rests; it created the classroom and mass education, the modern press and telegraph. It was the original assembly-line.
Counterblast, (1969), p 15
Quote #7458
Year: 1969
Chapter: Print
And with writing comes the break in that direct, intuitive relationship between men and their surroundings which modern art had begun to uncover.
“Culture without Literacy”, in Explorations #1, December (1953), p 119 reprinted in Essential McLuhan, (1995), p 304, additional reprint in Media Research Technology, Art and Communication (1997), p 128, and McLuhan Unbound #6, (2017)
Quote #7459
Year: 1953
Writing was a visualizing of the acoustic which split off or abstracted one aspect of speech, setting up a cultural disequilibrium of great violence. The dynamism of the Western world may well proceed from the dynamics of that disequilibrium.
“The Post-Literate Man”, 1973, in Cycles 7, p 230
Quote #7460
Year: 1973
Chapter: Postliteracy
So far as writing is the spatializing and arrest of oral speech. however, it implies that further command of space made possible by the written message and its attendant road system.
“Culture without Literacy”, in Explorations #1, December (1953), p 119 reprinted in Essential McLuhan, (1995), p 304, additional reprint in Media Research Technology, Art and Communication (1997), p 128 , and McLuhan Unbound #6, (2017)
Quote #7461
Year: 1953
Writing is metaphor for sound. It translates, or metamorphizes the audible into the visual.
“Radio and TV vs the ABCED-Minded”, in Explorations 5, June (1955), p 16, reprinted in Marshall McLuhan Essays Media Research: Technology Art Communication, (1997), p 84
Quote #7462
Year: 1955
Chapter: Analogy
Writing turned a spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech; writing was the visualization of acoustic space. It lit up the dark.

A goose quill put an end to talk, abolished mystery, gave us enclosed space and towns, brought roads and armies and bureaucracies. It was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of CIVILIZATION began, the step from the dark into the light of the mind. The hand that filled a paper built a city.

The handwriting is on the celluloid walls of Hollywood; the Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a NEW METAPHOR, restructure our thoughts and feelings. The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature.
“Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed the Breath”, in Shenandoah The Washington And Lee University Review, Vol.VII, No. 1, Autumn (1955), p 51, reprinted in Explorations 4, (1955), p 32, also reprinted in Explorations in Communication: an anthology (1960), p 207-208, The piece also appears in alternative format as part of Verbi-Voco-visual Explorations, (1967), Counterblast (1969), p 14, Essential McLuhan (1995), p 210
Quote #7463
Year: 1955

Drawn to McLuhan #9

Vintage-style cartoon illustration of a wild-eyed man in a red suit and hat running off the edge of a cliff while reading an open book and swinging a butterfly net at a monarch butterfly just out of reach.
“The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.”
Photograph of a museum gallery where two visitors view a large grid of nine framed screens/photographs depicting a lush green forest, arranged edge-to-edge on a white wall.
“The new media are not bridges between man and nature, they are nature.”
Illustrated cartoon of a man in a suit trapped and falling through the neck of a giant hourglass, being funneled through a glowing smartphone into a stream of binary code below, set against an aged newspaper-page background.
“The more that is recorded about each one of us in the data banks, the less we exist.”
Illustrated drawing of an anxious-looking woman biting a pencil while standing in a voting booth with curtains, other voters visible blurred in the background.
“The ballot box, for example, is the product of literate Western culture—a hot box in a cool world—and thus obsolescent. The tribal will is consensually expressed through the simultaneous interplay of all members of a community that is deeply interrelated and involved, and would thus consider the casting of a ‘private’ ballot in a shrouded polling booth a ludicrous anachronism.”
Weathered street-art photograph of three life-size paper cutout figures pasted on a green wooden wall, each wearing everyday clothing but with a motor-scooter front end/headlight in place of a head.
“People really do think of themselves as specialized machines nowadays. ‘That’s just my speed’ is a most revealing remark.”
Illustrated cartoon of a man sitting hunched before a panel of stern, seated academics at a curved tribunal table in a book-lined hall, with one panelist pointing accusingly as a large speech-bubble text looms overhead.
[In a 1976 letter to a student friend] “In passing, you mention that the moment of judgment would be a judgment by one's peers. This is indeed a terrifying thought.”
Illustrated cartoon of an army of angry, weapon-wielding question-mark characters storming a castle with ladders and axes, while a line of academics in caps and gowns holding open books stands defending the wall.
“Knowledge is a bigger obstacle to problem-solving than ignorance.”
Split illustration showing a man livestreaming from a home office on one side, connected across a globe by a glowing arc to a group of friends watching him on a laptop at an outdoor Paris cafe with the Eiffel Tower visible on the other side.
“If you are moving at the speed of light, you are already there.”
Illustrated comic panel of an older man in a brown tweed jacket and glasses (Marshall McLuhan) gesturing while speaking to a bearded interviewer holding a notebook and tape recorder, seated in a book-lined study with a globe nearby.
Illustrated cartoon of Marshall McLuhan in a suit, surfing on a board reading "The Medium Is the Message" atop a giant wave made of books, ancient Greek philosophers, and 20th-century pop-culture icons (Charlie Brown, Superman, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, the Beatles) surging around him.
“Control over change would seem to consist in moving with it but ahead of it.”
….it will help to recall that in the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worse. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialectic of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation. It was as if he foresaw the library of Alexandria and the unending exegesis upon previous exegesis of the scholiasts and grammarians.
“Sight, Sound and the Fury,” Commonweal, April 9, 1954, Vol. 60, No. 1, p 8
Quote #7464
Year: 1954
Writing is the translation of the audible into the visual. In large measure it is the spatialization of thought.
“Sight, Sound and the Fury,” Commonweal, April 9, 1954, Vol. 60, No. 1, p 8
Quote #7465
Year: 1954
Reading and writing in this respect represent an intense degree of specialization of experience. Writing meant that the acoustic world with its magic power over the being of things was arrested and banished to a humble sphere. Writing meant the power of fixing the flux of words and of thought. Writing permitted analysis of thought-processes which gave rise to the categories of knowledge. With writing came the power of visually enclosing not only acoustic space but architectural space. With writing came the separation of music from the dance, of both from words. Before writing, all these divisions were merged in a single “mythic” knowledge, a single rhythm where there was no present but all was now. FOUR QUARTETS of T. S. Eliot is a complete guide to our own recovery of acoustic modes of knowing our own and past experience. FINNEGANS WAKE of James Joyce is a verbal universe in which press, movie, radio, TV merge with the languages of the world to form a Feenichts Playhouse of metamorphoses.
Counterblast, (1969), pp 114-15.
Quote #7466
Year: 1969
The unassisted human voice which can reach at most a few dozen yards, imposes various conditions on a speaker. However, with the invention of the alphabet the voice was translated to a visual medium with the consequent loss of most of the qualities and effects. But its range in time and space was thus given enormous extension. At the same time the distance from the sender to the recipient of a message was extended, the number of those able to decipher the message was decreased. Writing, in other words, was a political revolution. It changed the nature of social communication and control
"Technology & Political Change," International Journal, Summer 1952.
Quote #7467
Year: 1952
Chapter: Oral
The Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings.
Counterblast (1969), p 14
Quote #7468
Year: 1969
Chapter: Today’s Transition
The hypertrophy of written messages, which has been dubbed “Parkinson’s Law” by its author, would appear to be caused not by paper-shuffling and the typewriter, but by the effort of the typewriter to keep pace with the acceleration of information movement created by the telephone and electronic media.
“Effects of the Improvements of Communication Media” (1960), p 567
Quote #7469
Year: 1960
Chapters: Media Study | Typewriter
“Writing extends the spatial range of speech but creates mental passivity. Writing fixes traditions but evokes large armies, roads and empires. Seen, however, as a special art form the alphabet refashioned all human experience.”
“The Later Innis”, Queen's Quarterly, 1953, p 387
Quote #7470
Year: 1953
Alphabetic writing is itself a radical re-ordering of experience, as we know by contrast with the pictorial or ideogrammic writing of China, which releases a totally different set of human possibilities in contrast to the unconscious preferences of alphabetic societies.
“The later Innis”, Queen's Quarterly, 1953, p 388
Quote #7471
Year: 1953
Xerography is bringing a reign of terror into the world of publishing, because it means that every reader can become both author and publisher.
"American Scholar," 1966. FLAG Need further citation specifics
Quote #7472
Year: 1966
Innis, in his Empire and Communication, explains how the Greeks destroyed themselves with their own alphabet… They hadn’t the wit to understand what was happening, or the courage or what not, and they simply destroyed themselves with their own writing system.
Joseph Foyle interview, in This Week (Dublin, Ireland, 1972), p 21.
Quote #7473
Year: 1972
Never hunt anything small.
Reported as a personal maxim by Eric McLuhan
Quote #7474
Chapters: McLuhan on McLuhan | McLuhanisms & Zingers
The most secret diary, even that of Samuel Pepys, written in a code which remained unbroken for centuries—even such a diary is for the writer a mask or a vortex of energy which increases his power over the language; for our mother tongue is itself a corporate mask of energy which is stepped up by the act of writing and, once again, by the act of publication.
At the Moment of Sputnik—1974, in The Man and His Message, 1989, pp 77-78
Quote #7475
Year: 1974
The phonetically written word, itself an abstract image of a spoken word, permits the prolonged analysis of process but does not greatly encourage the application of knowledge to action beyond the verbal sphere.
“Myth and Mass Media” (1960), p 292
Quote #7476
Year: 1960
Writing is impossible for man the food-gatherer but is inevitable for Neolithic man, the agriculturalist.
“The Role of Media in Communication Innovation” (1964), p 2
Quote #7477
Year: 1964
There’s no historical time until you have writing, and the idea of chronology is entirely lineal. If you don’t have a chronology, you have the year of the pig or the year or the fox or something like that…
J. Kirsch interview, September 13, 1976, transcript, p 13
Quote #7478
Year: 1976
Chapter: History
The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towns; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of civilization began, the step from the dark into the light of the mind. The hand that filled the parchment page built a city.
The Medium Is the Massage, with Quentin Fiore, 1967, p 48
Quote #7479
Year: 1967
Chapter: Wake Them Up!
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