A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Youth (34 quotes)
The young are really the heirs to a generation of incompetence.
Culture Is Our Business, 1970, p 212
Year: 1970
But when he [the teenager] looks at adults tackling these problems, he sees them hacking them into bits and pieces…selling them short by obsolescent arguments…nothing but bickering and squabbling.
The Teenager and The Media, Explorations for CBC May 18th, 1960 Trasnscript is Exhibit 2--Television Script, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June 1960, p xxxiii
Year: 1960
But the new generation, the TV generation, is in the habit of living in depth and when they go out, they go out into the middle-class world that is still organized in the old visual way and then they feel left out, excluded, unwanted.
P. Mansaram interview, 1967 [unpublished until it appeared on the McLuhan Galaxy blog in 2014],
Year: 1967
When you live in a world to which you have not adapted, or had time to adapt, you “grow up absurd.”
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 196
Year: 1970
Since television, our children have become grim, obsessional, and involved. The teen-ager no longer fits the adolescent classification.
“Pop Art Avant Garde?” (1966), p 214
Year: 1966
Our scientists are still inclined to make visual models of light particles, and particles that move at the speed of light, for which no visualization is possible. But this is the bias of a highly visual culture. I think our youngsters today coming through the rock-and-roll division are totally devoid of any need to visualize.
“Speaking Freely,” interview with Edwin Newman, WNBC-TV, December 27, 1970, transcript, p 17
Year: 1970
The seven-year-old today has had a heavy dose of adult experience and global imagery via TV. He enters grade school as an adult.
Culture Is Our Business (1970), p 78
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Change
Drawn to McLuhan #14
And when we tell the young that this new message is a threat to the old message or medium, we are telling them all we are striving to do in our united social and technical lives is destructive of all they hold dear. The young can only conclude that we are not serious. And this is the meaning of their decline of attention.
“Electronic Revolution,” 1959 speech, in Understanding Me (2003), p 3
Year: 1959
Today’s child is growing up absurd, because it lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up.
The Medium is the Massage, 1967, p. 18
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Between Two Ages
Growing up—that is our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice.
Address at Vision 65 (1965), p. 4
Year: 1965
Chapter:
Education
The young can only conclude that we are not serious. And this is the meaning of their decline of attention.
“The Electronic Revolution” (1959), in Understanding Me, 2003, p 3
Year: 1959
“The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by electric media—movies, Telstar, flight—far surpasses any possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts.
The Medium is the Massage, 1967, p. 14.
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Today’s Transition
The Hitler youth began as “flower people” until they encountered the rigidity of the establishment.
“Tribal Warfare in the 70s,” unpublished, single page typescript, 1970
Year: 1970
[Of youth in mid-60s] I myself think they are sinking into a kind of world where satisfactions are pathetically crude and feeble, compared to the ones we took for granted thirty years ago.
“An informal interview with Marshall McLuhan “, by Linda Sandler, In Miss Chateleine, Fall Fashion Issue, (1974), p 83
Year: 1974
When satellites and electric information went around the planet, they created a man-made environment…which ended the planet as a human habitat and turned it into the content of the man-made environment. The same thing will happen to the planet that’s happened to every other environment when it became the content of a new environment. It will become an art form. The future of the planet is camp, an old nose cone.
“Television in a New Light” in The Meaning of Commercial Television, ed. Stanley Donner (1966)
Year: 1966
The children who learned to read and write after TV, are a much more profound group, much more serious…. The TV generation of youngsters is grim, they're not light hearted, they're not playful, they're not detached, they have none of the fantasy of the old movie world or the old book world about them, they're deeply involved, they take everything very seriously. And well, including a lot of things that would be better to be handled more playfully…
“Joyce and Film” lecture delivered at Fordham U. in 1968, passage drawn from the transcript
Year: 1968
What the young are obviously telling us is this: we want beards, we want massive costumes and vestments for everybody. We do not want any of this simple, plain, individual stuff. We want the big corporate role.
“Electric Consciousness and the Church” (1970), in The Medium and the Light, (1999), p 83
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Putting On
The young have abandoned all job-holding and specialism in our of corporate costuming and role-playing. They are in the exact opposite position of Hamlet, who lived in an age when roles were thrown away, and Machiavelli and individuals were emerging.
“Electric Consciousness and the Church” (1970), in The Medium and the Light, (1999), p 83
Year: 1970
TV, which is an addictive inner trip (regardless of program), sent American youth in pursuit of the occult and group awareness.
“Violence of the Media” (1976), in MM: The Man and His Message (1989), p 94
Year: 1976
Their twenty-one-year-old brothers and sisters are a completely different bunch from the fourteen-, fifteen-, and sixteen-year-olds. Here's an area for research. Nobody ever researched this, but it's wide-open. When people understand that this generation gap is really a technological gap, it will help them to get things in some sort of order again.
First Lecture, Fordham University (1967), in Understanding Me (2003), p 142
Year: 1967
The kids are looking for some sort of stability. And the old comics have that kind of solid moral values – everything was right or wrong. And there are no moral values at the speed of light. Moral values just disappear.
“The Medium Brings His Message to the Governor,” Los Angeles Times, March 12, 1978, p F1
Year: 1978
The only order that the young can create, in a very fast-moving world of information overload, the only order they can create is that of myth. They don't think mythically, they
still think in the old patterns, 19th century patterns, but they live mythically, they live surrounded by mythic monsters, like go-go girls.
TV Interview with Fletcher Markle on CBC’s “Telescope 67” (1967); transcript
Year: 1967
The young people who have experienced a decade of TV have naturally imbibed an urge toward involvement in depth that makes all the remote visualized goals of usual culture seem not only unreal but irrelevant, and not only irrelevant but anemic.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 335
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Media Effects
The child as a separate social fact was an invention of the 17th century, according to the historian Philippe Ariès: historically the child came out of the 17th century and did not exist, so to speak, in Shakespeare's day. The child had, up until that time, been so completely merged in the adult world that there was nothing that could be called childhood in our sense at all. And so it is with the family, another 17th century discovery.
“Environment: The Future of an Erosion” (1967), in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 123
Year: 1967
… today's teens hate bigness. That is a peculiarity of electric speed where you have everything happening at once, in the same place. Instead of expansion or explosion, you have a sudden contracion or implosion. "Small is beautiful" is their motto. The fact that the ntire world is at their fingertips shapes their thinking. So they start to ask questions. "Why do we have giant expressways?" "Why do we need to keep going faster on them and in bigger and bigger vehicles?" “Why do we need railway tracks?" "Why all of this?"
“Religion and Youth”: Second Conversation with Pierre Babin (1977), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 95
Year: 1977
The teenager seems in many ways to be a tribal man.
NAEB Revised Report on Project in Understanding New Media (1960), p 127
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Retribalizing
The TV child ends to hold his book about 4.6” in front of his eyes. At that distance, and Hurst did these measurements over the years, at this distance you use only one eye, so the TV child is also monocular…
Talk to Ontario Teacher Education Collage, 1977, p 8
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Television
TV kids have no goals in education or living. They play the total field. Everything. They are hunters, not planters. A planter has his little strip culture, his own little pattern, his own little specialty, his own little skill. With electricity the whole field comes back into play. The little strip cultures such as basket-weaving and pot-making are gone. Our kids have no goals because they understand the world they are living in are living in and you can't have goals in an electronic total-field world. You cannot have fixed objectives. What do you put in their place? Roles! Involvement-participation in depth-- in pro- cesses. Our youngsters understand this without fail. They understand that the new kind of world in which they live demands absolute participation in processes.
“Education in the Electronic Age” Interchange, Vol 1, No 4 (1970)
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Today’s Transition
The kids are looking for some sort of stability. And the old comics have that kind of solid moral values - everything was right or wrong. And there are no moral values at the speed of light. Moral values just dissolve. That´s why you have separatism all around the world. Legal structures will not hold up at the speed of light. Electric information takes the place of legal bonds.
“Interview with Jerry Brown” in The CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter 1977-1978, p 178
Year: 1977
At the speed of light, the inner trip is all that's left. Young people prefer Zen Buddhism to our Western form of spirituality. They want to be immersed in things and lose the individual self, which is a by-product of the alphabet and the visual world that flows from it.
“Religion and Youth: Second Conversation with Pierre Babin” (1977), in The Medium and the Light, 1999, p 94
Year: 1977
Drug taking is also a means of expressing rejection of the obsolescent mechanical world and values.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media.” By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 66, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 254
Year: 1969
The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to “scrub” the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity like any corporate executive.
Culture is Our Business (1970), p 72.
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Television
The young are really the hairs to a generation of incompetence.
Culture Is Our Business ,(1970), p 212
Year: 1970
How do you get the children to a point where they are absolutely amazed at the world they live in? We’re seeing it happen to our children. It never happened in any recent period in human history, as far as I know, but these children are turned on, and it gives them a sense of power. That’s one of the most noxious and nauseating things about the teenagers – power. They feel that they can do anything, so they do.
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October 9-10, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, pp153-154
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Education