A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Found 14 quotes (2 duplicates hidden).
Electric persuasion by photo and movie and TV works, instead, by dunking entire populations in new imagery. Full awareness of this technological change had dawned on Madison Avenue ten years ago when it shifted its tactics from the promotion of the individual product to the collective involvement in the "corporate image," now altered to "corporate posture."
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 339
Quote #116
Year: 1964
Chapter: Advertising
What century is it today in Peking or Jerusalem or Moscow? Yet the very speed of communication between these entities so discontinuous in space, time, and experience makes for a simultaneity in which lineal history is abolished by becoming present. Coleridge, a myriad-minded man living in a most tumultuous age, might not have enjoyed our time more than his own, but he was forced to invent a great deal of conceptual equipment which is indispensable to an intellect of today.
“Coleridge as Artist” (1957), in The Interior Landscape (1969), p 116
Quote #1106
Year: 1957
Chapter: Cliché and Archetype
And A.T.W. Simeons has discussed at length how disruptive the second nature has been to the first. Made discarnate by our electric information media, the West is furiously at work retrieving its obsolesced organic first nature in a spectrum of new aesthetic modes, from feminism to phenomenology.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 116
Quote #1511
Year: 1988
Chapter: Discarnate
It is very rugged for a highly literate society, whether in Europe or here, to face the new world of resonant discontinuity. It means chaos in a literate society. That is why literate societies around the globe are having a very rough time. They are switching from visual order to auditory-resonant order and this gives a huge advantage to all tribal societies and all backward societies. That goes for the U.S. Backward people in the U.S. are now highly favoured: the North American Indian is making a very strong comeback in Canada, along with the Eskimo.
“The Hardware-Software Mergers: How Successful Have They Been?”, Speech given at the conference, Reappraisal of the Educational Technology Industry, University of Chicago, November 116-118, 1969, Transcript, p 9
Quote #1554
Year: 1969
Chapter: Discontinuity
As indicated earlier, all human artefacts are extensions of man, outerings or utterings of the human body or psyche, private or corporate That is to say. they are speech, and they are translations of us, the users, from one form into another form metaphors.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 116
Quote #2224
Year: 1988
Chapter: Extension Theory
In a world of rapid movement and change, everybody is a nobody, and the greatest head of state, when off-base, could be mistaken for a flunky.
“Liturgy and the Microphone”, (1974), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 116
Quote #2835
Year: 1974
Chapter: Identity
The power to translate knowledge into mechanical production by the breaking up of any process into fragmented aspects to be placed in a lineal sequence of movable, yet uniform, parts was the formal essence of the printing press. This amazing technique of spatial analysis duplicating itself at once, by a kind of echo, invaded the world of number and touch.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 116
Quote #3502
Year: 1964
Chapter: Linear and Nonlinear

Drawn to McLuhan #4

Color illustration of a tired-looking mother on a cluttered couch holding a baby, surrounded by several children of different ages, most of them absorbed in phones or the television rather than each other.
"We are not the true parents of our children."
Color illustration of a hand holding a wrinkled "Monthly Megabucks" alumni loan letter with a bold red "LOAN PAYMENT OVERDUE" stamp, spotlit against a black background.
"The trouble with a cheap specialized education is you never stop paying for it."
Mixed-media illustration of a pencil-sketched woman seen from behind looking into an ornate framed mirror; her reflection, rendered in full color, shows a polished professional alter-ego against a city skyline, beneath the caption "What AI Knows About You."
"The data banks know us better than we know ourselves."
Color illustration of a devastated, cracked cityscape with skyscrapers splitting apart and toppling into a flooded street beneath a smoky orange sky.
"The contained, the distinct, the separate – our Western legacy – are being replaced by the flowing, the unified, the fused."
Color comic illustration of Superman flying between two winged, haloed angels against a cloudy blue sky, visually likening him to a medieval angel.
"Superman is the comic strip brother of the medieval angels."
Color illustration of a street musician trio playing guitar, violin, and drum on a tree-lined urban path while a diverse crowd of people dance, cartwheel, and celebrate around them.
"Sound, in this new world of dance and song, is not for listening, it's for making."
Color comic-style illustration of a pilot and a woman having breakfast in an airport cafe overlooking the tarmac, where a ground crew member signals a parked jet with semaphore flags; a speech bubble reads "Weird. He just said to the pilot, 'Knock knock'..."
"If our new media constitute so complete a range of expressiveness as both to enhance and almost to supplant speech itself, then we will have moved into the period of post-literacy."
Color cartoon of scientists in lab coats dancing among physics laboratory equipment, with a speech bubble joking about subatomic particles "dancing," while two onlookers watch in surprise from the doorway.
"Science and magic have married each other."
Color illustration of a string quartet performing on a circular stage in an ornate domed concert hall; one of the four musicians is depicted as a metallic robot playing alongside the human performers, before an applauding crowd.
"Nothing is so human about us as our technology."
Color cartoon illustration of a female stand-up comedian performing on a small club stage under a "The Laugh Comedy" marquee, with an enthusiastic audience laughing, clapping, and cheering below her.
"Manslaughter and man's laughter are spelled the same."
Bureaucracy in all its forms is in trouble. Even the telephone system itself is now pressed by satellite speed-up. The stock exchange has to close down for awhile every week in order to sort out the securities that were earlier sold by electric speeds.
“The Hardware-Software Mergers: How Successful Have They Been?” Speech at the conference, Reappraisal of the Educational Technology Industry, University of Chicago, November 116-18, 1969, Transcript, p 4
Quote #3642
Year: 1969
Chapter: Management
Media are artificial extensions of sensory existence. each an externalized species of the inner genus sensation
Counterblast 1969, p 116
Quote #4487
Year: 1969
Chapter: Media
Was it Bertrand Russell who asked if we were in a bath whose temperature rose half a degree an hour, how would we know when to scream? The pattern recognition that is quite impossible during processes of slow change, becomes quite easy when the same changes are speeded up even to movie or cinematic levels. So, the artist, as a creator of anti-environments or counter-environments, created to permit perception of environments, has a very peculiar role in our society.
“The Invisible Environment: The Future of an Erosion”, Perspecta, Vol.11, (1967), p 165, reprinted in On the Nature of Media, (2016), p 116
Quote #5275
Year: 1967
Chapter: Pattern Recognition
↪ Also at #5303
A picture has a vanishing point related to a fixed position from which the picture is taken, but a mosaic, like a total field of energy or relationships, does not present the means for a point of view or a fixed position. It is an all-a-once or mythical structure in which beginning and middle and end are simultaneously present.
“Environment as Programmed Happening” (1967), p 116
Quote #5343
Year: 1967
Chapters: Perspective, Point of View | Simultaneity
↪ Also at #6396
Anybody who has examined the development of new awareness in poetry and painting resulting from the forms of book, press and photograph will know that the sensibility of the young of today is being reshaped more rapidly than we are forming concepts about the matter.
“David Riesman and the Avant-Garde,” in Explorations 7, 1957, p 116
Quote #5495
Year: 1957
Chapter: Poetry
[Reputedly announced in 1967-1968 while in NYC, but neither published nor recorded]
Within fifteen years an actor will be elected president.
Widely cited, likely first uttered in a lecture at Fordham, 1967-1968; among many secondary citations, Judith Fitzgerald’s Marshall McLuhan Wise Guy (2001), p 116
Quote #5650
Year: 1967
Chapter: Predictions
The “literacy of the blind” is like that of the Chinese – multi-sensuous. The literacy of the sighted created dissociated sensibility.
Culture Is Our Business ,(1970), p 116
Quote #7301
Year: 1970
Chapter: Visual Space
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