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Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Herbert Marshall McLuhan, was a Canadian professor, philosopher, and public intellectual. His work is one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge; he began his teaching career as a Professor of English at several universities in the U.S. and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto, where he remained for the rest of his life.

McLuhan is known for coining the expression "the medium is the message" and the term global village, and for predicting the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s. In the years after his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. With the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, however, interest was renewed in his work and perspective.

✵ 21. July 1911 – 31. December 1980
Marshall McLuhan photo
Marshall McLuhan: 416   quotes 16   likes

Marshall McLuhan Quotes

“The sociologist permits himself to see only what is acceptable to his colleagues.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 370

“Bacon's Adam is a medieval mystic and Milton's a trade union organizer.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 214

“Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 71

“The “natural magic” of the camera obscura anticipated Hollywood in turning the spectacle of the external world into a consumer commodity or package.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 146

World , Nature

“The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 21

World

“The culture-heroes of preliteracy and postliteracy alike are robots.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 79

“Computers can do better than ever what needn’t be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 109

Sense

“By involving all men in all men, by the electric extension of their own nervous systems, the new technology turns the figure of the primitive society into a universal ground that buries all previous figures.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 25

Men , Universe

“The print-made split between head and heart is the trauma which affects Europe from Machiavelli till the present.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 193

Heart

“If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.”

Marshall McLuhan

To Wilfred Watson, October 6 1965. Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 325
1960s

Art , Painting

“The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 369

Personality

“The twentieth century encounter between alphabetic and electronic forces of culture confers on the printed word a crucial role in staying the return to “the Africa within.””

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 51

“Rabelais offers a vision of the future of print culture as a consumer's paradise of applied knowledge.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 167

Knowledge , Future

“The artists of our culture, 'the antennae of the race,' had tuned in to the new ground and begun exploring discontinuity and simultaneity.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 47

“By electricity we have not been driven out of our senses so much as our senses have been driven out of us.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 375

Sense

“The magic of the cave image lies in its being, not in its being seen. The symbolic does not refer. It is.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 350

“People don't actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 184

People , Reading

“Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, The argument: causality in the electric world (1973)

Art , Search

“The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the new culture of individualism.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 233

Books , Painting

“The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for experimental exploration – the technique of the suspended judgement.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 81

“With [Francis] Bacon, Vico continuously asserts the claims of grammar as true science precisely because it has not yielded to specialism and method.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 220

Science

“While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 52

Literature

“America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy — the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the USA.”

Marshall McLuhan

Letter to Ezra Pound (21 December 1948)
1940s

“Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 30

World

“The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.”

Marshall McLuhan

Tyuonyi, Volumes 1-2, 1985, p. 60
1980s

Family , Way , Communication , Sense

“Current concern with reading and spelling reform steers away from visual to auditory stress.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 54

Reading

“The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.”

Marshall McLuhan

Mademoiselle: the magazine for the smart young woman, Volume 64, 1966, p. 114
1960s

“Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p.73 of the 1966 Signet paperback edition

Sense

“When we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electric technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people. To survive one must study the habits of cannibals.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Hot & Cool (1967), p. 261

People , Study

“Our senses are not receptors so much as reactors and makers of different modalities of space. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 256

Life , Sense

“Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 225

Time

“Logic is figure without a ground. (p. 241)”

Marshall McLuhan

1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011)

“The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography. The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, created extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 23

“In Chinese, honesty is the figure of a man standing, physically standing, beside his work. That means honesty: a man stands by his work. Two things: figure / ground.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 314

“Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is "pastimes are past times". The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of past times that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, From Cliché to Archetype (1970), p.99

Men , Age , World , Game

“All of the new media have enriched our perceptions of language and older media. They are to the man-made environment what species are to biology.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 84

“The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos – resonant utterance or word.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 35

“All media are extensions of some human faculty -- psychic or physical.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967)

“We are swiftly moving at present from an era where business was our culture into an era when culture will be our business. Between these poles stand the huge and ambiguous entertainment industries.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 384

Business

“The 4 aspects of each of the media actually constitute the four features of all metaphors. In other words, all human technologies whatever are, in the fullest sense, linguistic outerings, or utterings, of man.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 275

Sense

“Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 85

Nature

“Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Understanding Media (1964)

Sense , Time

“The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Understanding Media (1964)

“Today, computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 80

“One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 298

“Native societies did not think of themselves as being in the world as occupants but considered that their rituals created the world and keep it operational.”

Marshall McLuhan

College and University Journal, Volumes 6-7, American College Public Relations Association, 1967, p. 3
1960s

World , Thinking

“All words at every level of prose and poetry and all devices of language and speech derive their meaning from figure / ground relation.”

Marshall McLuhan

quoted in McLuhan: A Guide for the Perplexed by W. Terrence Gordon, 2010, p. 167
1980s

“The celebrated earthy tactility of Rabelais is a massive backwash of receding manuscript culture.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 170

“There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.”

Marshall McLuhan

Letter to Harold Adam Innis (14 March 1951), published in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 223
1950s

Time

“Q: Do you feel a need to be distinctive and mass-produced? Q: Are you in the groove? That is, are you moving in ever-diminishing circles? Q: How often do you change your mind, your politics, your clothes?”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 121-125

Feeling , Change , Clothes