1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan Quotes
page 5

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 quotes16 likes

Marshall McLuhan Quotes

“The hot radio medium used in cool or nonliterate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 30

“The sheer increase in the quantity of information movement favoured the visual organization of knowledge and the rise of perspective even before typography.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 128

“The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 114

“The Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 14

“The medieval student had to be paleographer, editor, and publisher of the authors he read.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 109

“Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967)

“The user is the content of any situation, whether its driving a car, or wearing clothes or watching a show. The user is content.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder (1976)

“Formal logic and the logical syllogism encapsulate connectedness in reasoning.”

Marshall McLuhan

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

“Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 86

“The "tragic flaw" is not a detail of characterization, a mere "fly in the ointment", but a structural feature of ordinary consciousness.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, From Cliché to Archetype (1970), p.45

“The newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem, environmental and invisible, as poem.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

“The public has yet to see TV as TV. Broadcasters have no awareness of its potential. The movie people are just beginning to get a grasp on film.”

Marshall McLuhan

quoted in "Marshall McLuhan, Author, Dies; Declared 'Medium Is the Message'" by Alden Whitman, The New York Times, January 1, 1981
1980s

“We have become like the most primitive Palaeolithic man, once more global wanderers, but information gatherers rather than food gatherers. From now on the source of food, wealth and life itself will be information.”

Marshall McLuhan

1990s and beyond, "The Agenbite of Outwit" (1998)

“Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.”

Marshall McLuhan

1990s and beyond, "The Agenbite of Outwit" (1998)

“The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.”

Marshall McLuhan

quoted in "Marshall McLuhan, Author, Dies; Declared 'Medium Is the Message'" by Alden Whitman, The New York Times, January 1, 1981
1980s

“When you move into a new area, a new territory and learn a new language, the language is not a new subject, it is an environment, it is total. (p. 105)”

Marshall McLuhan

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

“Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 133

“Casting my perils before swains.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Hot & Cool (1967)

“The telegraph press mosaic is acoustic space as much as an electric circus.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

“Disarmament is illogical and futile, unless one is prepared to regard the available means of production and social organization as affording unique social ends. To divert electrical energy and circuitry into atomic bombs shows the same imaginative power as wiring the dining-room chairs to enable one to electrocute the sitter in the event that he might prove hostile. It is part of the age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, From Cliché to Archetype (1970), p.202

“Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.”

Marshall McLuhan

Variant: Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog. (p. 13)
Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 13

“Radio comes to us ostensibly with person to person directness that is private and intimate, while in more urgent fact, it is really a subliminal echo chamber of magic power to touch remote and forgotten chords.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 302

“The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it’s the universal experience of TV watchers.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Playboy Interview (1969)

“Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 121

“Cervantes confronted typographic man in the figure of Don Quixote.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 242

“Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, The Education of Mike McManus, TVOntario, December 28 1977

“Human perception is literally incarnation.”

Marshall McLuhan

"Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters", in Christian Humanism in Letters, The McAuley Lectures (1954), p. 49-67
1950s

“At the speed of light there is no sequence; everything happens at the same instant.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder (1976)

“Jacques Ellul observes in Propaganda: When dialogue begins, propaganda ends. His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology but rather the action and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda", for this reason. It blankets perception and supresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, From Cliché to Archetype (1970), p.77

“Each new technology is a reprogramming of sensory life.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 33

“All advertising advertises advertising – no ad has its meaning alone.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 145

“We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of "nature." Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, A McLuhan Sourcebook (1995), p. 276

“Language is a sense, like touch. (p. 271)”

Marshall McLuhan

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

“The typographic lore of school children points to the gap between the scribal and typographic man.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 103

“Older cliches are retrieved both as inherent principles that inform the new ground and new awareness, and as archetypal nostalgia figures with transformed meaning in relation to the new ground.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 105

“Marlowe anticipated Whitman's barbaric yawp by setting up a national PA system of blank verse – a rising iambic system of sound to suit the new success story.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 223

“When Coleridge said that all men are born either Platonists or Aristotelians, he was saying that all men tend to be either acoustic or visual in their sensory bias.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 113

“Headlines are icons, not literature.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 5

“Paradox is the technique for seizing the conflicting aspects of any problem. Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 106

“Although the medium is the message, the controls go beyond programming. The restraints are always directed to the “content,” which is always another medium. The content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel. So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 267

“The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 205

“Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.”

Marshall McLuhan

Letter to Clare Westcott, November 26 1975. Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p. 514
1970s

“Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 231

“The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1950s, The Mechanical Bride (1951), p. 21

“Instead of scurrying into a corner and wailing about what media are doing to us, one should charge straight ahead and kick them in the electrodes.”

Marshall McLuhan

from a 1960 report to the National Educational Broadcasters Association, quoted in Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger by Philip Marchand, p. 148
1960s

“Tactility is the space of the interval; acoustic space is spherical and resonant.”

Marshall McLuhan

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

“Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 36

“The Homeric hero becomes a split-man as he assumes an individual ego.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 58

“Print, in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 226

“The laws of the media, in tetrad form, bring logos and formal cause up to date to reveal analytically the structure of all human artefacts.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 127