A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Found 8 quotes (3 duplicates hidden).
This indifference is shared by the artist "since Cezanne." A great art historian like Sigfried Giedion has extrapolated the new art approaches to space since Cezanne to include "popular culture" and "anonymous history." Art is for him as inclusive an idea as "mimesis" is for Aristotle.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), p 65
Quote #279
Year: 1962
Chapter: Anonymous History
The President needs me. I don’t know what our President would do without me. Claude Bissel that is, the President of dear old Toronto University, not Iike the President of the United States, who by the way I do not like. Claude has asked me to give his advisory group of senior academics the benefit of my views on the changes in higher learning necessitated by the electric age. It pains me to think of the changes sweeping through our leather-patched, tweed-ridden, and chalk-dusty world of which this august body is totally oblivious. No matter, it is my duty to tell them what they do not know. In short they are obsolete. I wonder how they will take the news.
Letter to Claude Bissel, Jan 4, 1961, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 279
Quote #1789
Year: 1961
Chapters: Education | LOM 2 - Obsolesce | McLuhan on McLuhan
↪ Also at #3393, #3855
Do not T.S. Eliot's famous lines about the typist of the jazz age capture the entire pathos of the age of Chaplin and the ragtime blues?
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 279
Quote #1983
Year: 1964
Chapter: Eliot, T.S.
Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity.
“The Hot and Cool Interview” (1967), in McLuhan Hot and Cool (1967), p 279
Quote #2728
Year: 1967
Chapter: Hostility to McLuhan
You cannot see the writing on the wall till your back is up against it.
“Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 279
Quote #4099
Year: 1979
Chapter: McLuhanisms & Zingers
The extension of the metaphor knocked down the walls of his castle at once. The pollutions of the outside world were now inside his home. Notice all the beasts that inhabit the imagination of Lewis' Carroll's Alice. Freud merely completed the "pollution" of the English-man's castle.
“Out of the Castle into the Counting-House”, in Politics: a monthly review (1945), p 279
Quote #5429
Year: 1945
Chapter: Planet, Nature
Our most ordinary and conventional attitudes seem suddenly twisted into gargoyles and grotesques. Familiar institutions and associations seem at times menacing and malignant. These multiple transformations, which are the normal consequence of introducing new media into any society whatever, need special study and will be the subject of another volume on Understanding Media in the world of our time.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 279
Quote #7070
Year: 1962
Chapter: Transform

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."
When notes for briefing individuals or groups are first typed and then Xeroxed, it is as if a private manuscript were put in the hands of the general reader. The typewriter plus photocopying thus, unexpectedly, restores many of the features of confidential hand-written records.
“Do Books Matter?” Proceedings of a seminar promoted by the Working Party on Library and Book Trade Relations and the National Book League; reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), pages179-180 and Essential McLuhan (1997, UK) p 279.
Quote #7488
Year: 2003
Chapter: Xerography
↪ Also at #7486
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