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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 Concept of Dread, by Soren Kierkegaard, appeared in 1844, first year of the commercial telegraph…It mentions the telegraph as a reason for dread and nowness or existenz.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

Appearance

“Bless advertising art for its pictorial vitality and verbal creativity.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 18

Art

“There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 60

“Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.”

Marshall McLuhan

Access, Issues 165-176, National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting, 1984, p. xxiii
1980s

Speed

“The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. The book is a private confessional form that provides a “point of view.””

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 204

Books , Communication

“Does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes?”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 28

Sense , Change

“When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970), p. 180

“All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.”

Marshall McLuhan

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

“A fixed point of view becomes possible with print and ends the image as a plastic organism.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 144

“The uniformity and repeatability of print created the “political arithmetic” of the seventeenth century and the “hedonistic calculus” of the eighteenth.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 237

“The field of 'information theory' began by using the old hardware paradigm of transportation of data from point to point.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 111

“Philosophy was as naive as science in its unconscious acceptance of the assumptions or dynamic of typography.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 278

Science

“Violence is the effort to maintain and restore a weakened psyche.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 377

Effort

“The unique innovation of the phonetic alphabet released the Greeks from the universal acoustic spill of tribal societies.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 70

Universe

“By simply moving information and brushing information against information, any medium whatever creates vast wealth.”

Marshall McLuhan

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

Wealth

“Invention is the mother of all necessities.”

Marshall McLuhan

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

“It is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behaviour.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Understanding Media (1964)

Understanding

“As the totem pole is tied to the lineality of the missionaries' Bible, so the igloo was made possible by the primus stove.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

“The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970), p. 168

Time , Clothes

“The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 136

Age , World , Art

“The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces.”

Marshall McLuhan

Arts in society, Volume 3, 1964, p. 242
1960s

“In Catch-22, the figure of the black market and the ground of war merge into a monster presided over by the syndicate. When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 211

Money , War

“Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature.</i”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 11

Art , Nature

“Marx shared with economists then and since the inability to make his concepts include innovational processes. It is one thing to spot a new product but quite another to observe the invisible new environments generated by the action of the product on a variety of pre-existing social grounds.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 63

“African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 44

“I am a pattern watcher. (p. 311)”

Marshall McLuhan

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

“I heard what you were saying. You - you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.”

Marshall McLuhan

Cameo appearance as himself in Woody Allen's 1977 film Annie Hall
1970s

“There is no connection between the elements in an electric world, which is equivalent to being surrounded by the human unconscious.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 260

World

“Visual space is the space of detachment. Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970), p. 194

“Print created national uniformity and government centralism, but also individualism and opposition to government as such.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 267

“Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 37

Nature

“Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Playboy Interview (1969)

Dreams , Science

“Gutenberg made all history available as classified data: the transportable book brought the world of the dead into the space of the gentlemen's library; the telegraph brought the entire world of the living to the workman's breakfast table.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 15

Books , World , History , Dead

“A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor?”

Marshall McLuhan

A play on the line's in Robert Browning's poem "Andrea del Sarto":
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?
Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p.7

“The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 55

Intelligence , Future

“Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception.”

Marshall McLuhan

Eye Appeal, p. 79-80
1950s, The Mechanical Bride (1951)

Life , Guy , Business

“The Chinese used the intervals between things as the primary means of getting 'in touch' with situations.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 77

“The victory over Euclidean space was not achieved by isolated individuals, but by a field of young rebels opposed to all absolutes.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 42

Victory

“When we put our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomadic state.”

Marshall McLuhan

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

“Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 114

“The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967), p. 122

Idea , Effort

“Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been…destroyed by sudden environmental change.”

Marshall McLuhan

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

Change

“All of man's artefacts, whether hardware or software, whether bulldozers or laws of chemistry, are alike linguistic in structure and intent.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 227

Law

“Since Sputnik, the earth has been wrapped in a dome-like blanket or bubble. Nature ended.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

Nature

“Try not to have Emily exposed to hours and hours of TV. It is a vile drug which permeates the nervous system, especially in the young.”

Marshall McLuhan

Letter to son Eric McLuhan, regarding one of Eric's daughters, 1976
1970s

“The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation.”

Marshall McLuhan

quoted in "The Prospects of Recording" by Glenn Gould, The Glenn Gould reader, 1984, p. 345
1980s

“Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

Nature

“Formal cause, as logos, incorporates the patterns of side-effects as part of essential nature: tetrads restore poesis and the making process to the study of artefacts.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 227

Nature , Study , Parting

“The role of the artist is to create an Anti-environment as a means of perception and adjustment.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 31

“You don't like those ideas? I got others!”

Marshall McLuhan

full lecture The Medium is the Message 1977 part 1 v3 around 14:23 into ABC TV, Monday Conference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImaH51F4HBw&feature=player_embedded
1970s

Idea