A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Just because all the king’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again, it doesn’t follow that electromagnetic automation couldn’t have put Humpty Dumpty back together. The integral and unified egg had no business sitting on a wall, anyway. Walls are made of uniformly fragmented bricks that arise with specialisms and bureaucracies. They are the deadly enemies of integral beings like eggs. Humpty Dumpty met the challenge of the wall with a spectacular collapse.
“Humpty Dumpty, Automation, and TV” [University of Toronto] Varsity Graduate, Volume 10, Number 4, Summer, 1963, p 25
Year: 1963
↪ Also at #2503, #6476
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan