A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

The matrix of the family, the community, has been ripped off by new instruments of transportation, which simply eliminate the neighborliness and the natural rapport that men have with one another by proximity and daily dialogue and familiarity. It is the daily dialogue and familiarity that has been ripped off by rapid transport, so that people now go as quickly to Berlin, or to a Munich, or to Moscow, as formally they made a short journey or rather a 30 or 40 mile journey to some neighborhood on their own country. Now this has temporarily at least destroyed what we call community and so the family is left isolated, the nuclear family, stark naked unsupported by community.
Televised interview by Father Patrick Peyton, on Father Peyton’s Family Theatre, 1972; transcript, p 10
Year: 1972
Chapter: Speedups
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan