1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan Quotes
page 7

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

“Left hemisphere industrialism has blinded the Chinese to the effects of our alphabet: pattern recognition is in the right hemisphere.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 81

“Newton, and 'proper scientific method' after him, conducted attention to 'continuous description' of experimental phenomena instead of to causes.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 50

“Even pacifist agitation or the nation-wide fever of big sports competitions acts as a spur to war fever in circumstances like ours. Any kind of excitement or emotion contributes to the possibility of dangerous explosions when the feelings of huge populations are kept inflamed even in peacetime for the sake of the advancement of commerce. Headlines mean street sales. It takes emotion to move merchandise. And wars and rumors of wars are the merchandise and also the emotion of the popular press.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1950s, The Mechanical Bride (1951), p. 7

“Pornography and obscenity…work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground -- situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.”

Marshall McLuhan

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

“It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 82

“History as she is harped. Rite words in rote order. (pp. 108-109)”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967)

“The discarnate TV user lives in a world between fantasy and dream, and is in a typically hypnotic state, which is the ultimate form and level of participation.”

Marshall McLuhan

"A Last Look at the Tube." New York Magazine, 17 March 1978, p. 45-48
1970s

“The new overkill is simply an extension of our nervous system into a total ecological service environment. Such a service environment can liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries as naturally as it sustains them.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 152

“The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.”

Marshall McLuhan

"Roles, Masks, and Performances", New Literary History, Vol. 2, No. 3, Performances in Drama, the Arts, and Society (Spring, 1971), p. 520
1970s

“My method is vertical rather than horizontal so the scenery does not change but the texture does.”

Marshall McLuhan

Letter to The Listener October 1971, Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 318
1970s

“Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 149

“Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 17

“A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 49

“Tactility is space of the interval.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

“New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 47

“Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Forces interview (1973)

“Bless Madison Ave for restoring the magical art of the cavemen to suburbia.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 130

“My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age”

Marshall McLuhan

Letter to Robert Fulford, 1964. Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 300
1960s
Context: My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

“The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 103

“The increase of visual stress among the Greeks alienated them from the primitive art that the electronic age now reinvents after interiorizing the “unified field” of electric all-at-onceness.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 72

“Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 113

“In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.”

Marshall McLuhan

"Innovation is obsolete", Evergreen review, Volume 15, Issues 86-94, Grove Press, 1971, p. 64
1970s

“The media have substituted themselves for the older world.”

Marshall McLuhan

"Education, Language, and Media". Cycle 7, 1973, p. 232
1970s

“Each of our senses makes its own space, but no sense can function in isolation. Only as sight relates the touch, or kinaesthesia, or sound, can the eye see.”

Marshall McLuhan

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

“I don't explain—I explore.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Hot & Cool (1967)

“In this book we turn to the study of new patterns of energy arising from man’s physical and psychic artifacts and social organizations. The only method for perceiving process and pattern is by inventory of effects obtained by the comparison and contrast of developing situations.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 8

“Languages are environments to which the child related synesthetically.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 166

“Cartoons drove the photo back to myth and dream screen.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

“By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 15

“Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.”

Marshall McLuhan

Yeats studies, Issue 2, Irish University Press, 1972, p. 135
1970s

“The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 74

“World War I a railway war of centralization and encirclement. World War II a radio war of decentralization concluded by the Bomb. World War III a TV guerrilla war with no divisions between civil and military fronts.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 152

“Our book technology has Gutenberg at one end and the Ford assembly lines at the other. Both are obsolete.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 99

“Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.”

Marshall McLuhan

"Violence in the media." Canadian Forum. Volume 56, 1976, p. 9
1970s

“One touch of nature makes the whole world tin.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

“The reduction of the tactile qualities of life and language constitute the refinement sought in the Renaissance and repudiated now in the electronic age.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 272

“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970), p.66

“With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 177

“While people are engaged in creating a totally different world, they always form vivid images of the preceding world.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 21

“We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture. (p. 16)”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Understanding Media (1964)

“In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 47

“The Greeks encountered the confusion of tongues when numbers invaded Euclidean space.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 203

“TV is not good at covering single events. It needs a ritual, a rhythm, and a pattern…[TV] tends to fosters patterns rather than events.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder (1976)

“The book is a private confessional form that provides a “point of view.””

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Understanding Media (1964)

“At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 109

“The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity. (p. 135)”

Marshall McLuhan

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

“Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 362

“The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of culture, as Harold Innis was the first to show.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 56

“Acoustic space is totally discontinuous, like touch. It is a sphere without centers or margins.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

“Typography cracked the voices of silence.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 283