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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 quotes16 likes

Marshall McLuhan Quotes

“To say that a body or its gravitational field 'bends in space' in its vicinity is the discuss visual space in acoustic terms.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 40

“With TV, came the icon, the inclusive image, the inclusive political posture or stance.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 191

“Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which humans communicate than by the content of the communication.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 23

“The mother tongue is propaganda.”

Marshall McLuhan

The University of Windsor review, Volumes 1-2, 1965, p. 10
1960s

“The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive. (p. 201)”

Marshall McLuhan

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

“When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 47

“Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 298

“The present volume to this point might be regarded as a gloss on a single text of Harold Innis: "The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century."”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 216; McLuhan here quotes "Minerva's Owl" (1947), by Innis, an address to the Royal Society of Canada, published in The Bias of Communication (1951)

“For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1950s, The Mechanical Bride (1951), p. 85; "Magic that Changes Mood")

“[On Jimmy Carter] "Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place."”

Marshall McLuhan

Brand, Stewart. "McLuhan's last words". New Scientist, 29 Jan 1981.
1980s

“If the criminal appears as a nonconformist who is unable to meet the demand of technology that we behave in uniform and continuous patterns, literate man is quite inclined to see others who cannot conform as somewhat.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 31

“The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 154

“The “interface” of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism – a formula for blitz and metamorphosis.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 161

“Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always preceed causes in the actual developmental order.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 303

“For me any of the little gestures I make are all tentative probes. That's why I feel free to make them sound as outrageous or extreme as possible. Until you make it extreme, the probe is not very efficient.”

Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan: the man and his message, edited by George Sanderson and Frank MacDonald, Fulcrum, 1989, p. 32
1980s and later

“Interface, of the resonant interval as 'where the action is', whether chemical, psychic or social, involves touch.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 102

“New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.”

Marshall McLuhan

Arts in society, Volume 3, 1964, p. 240
1960s

“The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 18

“All media exists to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 199

“The coverage is the war. If there were no coverage, there'd be no war. Yes, the newsmen and the mediamen around the world are actually the fighters, not the soldiers anymore.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Forces interview (1973)

“At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology. (p. 300)”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Understanding Media (1964)

“People never remember but the computer never forgets.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 69

“The pre-atomist multisensory void was an animate, pulsating, and moving vibrant interval, neither container nor contained, acoustic space penetrated by tactility.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 34

“Applied knowledge in the Renaissance had to take the form of translation of the auditory into visual terms, of the plastic into retinal form.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 180

“Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 43

“To the blind all things are sudden. (p. 41)”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Counterblast (1969)

“Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 55

“Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967)

“It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter.”

Marshall McLuhan

(1957) from "Classroom Without Walls", Explorations Vol. 7, 1957; reprinted in Explorations in Communication ed. E. Carpenter & M. McLuhan, (Boston: Beacon, 1960); and again in McLuhan: Hot and Cool ed. G. E. Stearn (NY: Dial, 1967).
1960s, Hot & Cool (1967)

“Privacy invasion is now one of biggest knowledge industries.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970), p. 24

“Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. We lose "touch" without it. Visual space is the space of detachment.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

“We begin again to structure the primordial feelings…from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us. We begin again to live a myth.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 17

“Language is a form of organized stutter.”

Marshall McLuhan

Interview with John Lennon, December 1969, CBS Television
1960s

“Language alone includes all the senses in interplay at all times.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 253

“The comic strip: upholder of Homeric culture.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p.19

“Unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitutes a total and near-instanteous transformation of culture, values and attitudes.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Playboy Interview (1969)

“Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 183

“The audience, as ground, shapes and controls the work of art.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 48

“The potential of any new technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 210

“Non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 41

“Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Through the Vanishing Point (1968)

“Literacy, in translating man out of the closed world of tribal depth and resonance, gave man an eye for an ear and ushered him into a visual open world of specialized and divided consciousness.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

“PLAYBOY: A Columbia coed was recently quoted in Newsweek as equating you and LSD. “LSD doesn’t mean anything until you consume it,” she said. “Likewise McLuhan.” Do you see any similarities?
McLUHAN: I’m flattered to hear my work described as hallucinogenic, but I suspect that some of my academic critics find me a bad trip.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Playboy Interview (1969)

“Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.”

Marshall McLuhan

Commonweal, Vol. 58 (1953), p. 557
1950s

“Sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal hoard. The box office looms as a return to the echo chamber of bardic incantation.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 288

“The user of the electric light -- or a hammer, or a language, or a book -- is the content. As such, there is a total metamorphosis of the user by the interface. It is the metamorphosis that I consider the message.”

Marshall McLuhan

Letter to Edward T. Hall, 1971, Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p. 397
1970s

“The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 8

“Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 43

“The levelling of inflexion and of wordplay became part of the program of applied knowledge in the seventeenth century.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 265

“Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 67