A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

That situation...always adds up to the need to discover means for translating the experience of one medium or one culture into another, of translating Confucius into Western terms and Kant into Eastern terms. Of seeing our old literary culture in the new plastic terms in order to enable it to become a constitutive part of the new culture created by the orchestral voices and gestures of new media. Of seeing that modern physics and painting and poetry speak a common language and of acquiring that language at once in order that our world may possess consciously the coherence that it really has in latency, and which for lack of our recognition has created not new orchestral harmonies but mere noise.
“Culture without Literacy”, in Explorations #1, December (1953), p 126 reprinted in Essential McLuhan, (1995), p 311, additional reprint in Media Research Technology, Art and Communication (1997), p 136, and McLuhan Unbound #6, (2017)
Year: 1953
Chapters: Harmony | Living Unity
↪ Also at #3573
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan