Top 300 Marshall McLuhan Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Marshall McLuhan

2. “Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.”

— Marshall McLuhan

3. “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”

— Marshall McLuhan

4. “There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.”

— Marshall McLuhan

5. “We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

— Marshall McLuhan

6. “The medium is the message.”

— Marshall McLuhan

7. “The future of work consists of learning a living.”

— Marshall McLuhan

8. “Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.”

— Marshall McLuhan

9. “The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.”

— Marshall McLuhan

10. “First we build the tools, then they build us.”

— Marshall McLuhan

11. “I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.”

— Marshall McLuhan

12. “Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.”

— Marshall McLuhan

13. “All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.”

— Marshall McLuhan

14. “Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.”

— Marshall McLuhan

15. “On Spaceship Earth there are no passengers; everybody is a member of the crew. We have moved into an age in which everybody’s activities affect everybody else.”

— Marshall McLuhan

16. “I don’t necessarily agree with everything that I say.”

— Marshall McLuhan

17. “I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt.”

— Marshall McLuhan

18. “The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”

— Marshall McLuhan

19. “Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools and yesterday’s concepts.”

— Marshall McLuhan

20. “We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.”

— Marshall McLuhan

21. “Money is a poor man’s credit card.”

— Marshall McLuhan

22. “If it works, it’s obsolete.”

— Marshall McLuhan

23. “Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.”

— Marshall McLuhan

24. “I do not explain, I explore.”

— Marshall McLuhan

25. “We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t the fish.”

— Marshall McLuhan

26. “Our technology forces us to live mythically.”

— Marshall McLuhan

27. “Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.”

— Marshall McLuhan

28. “The computer is the most extraordinary of man’s technological clothing; it’s an extension of our central nervous system. Beside it, the wheel is a mere hula-hoop.”

— Marshall McLuhan

29. “Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher.”

— Marshall McLuhan

30. “There ain’t no grammatical errors in a non-literate society.”

— Marshall McLuhan

31. “Technology is that which separates us from our environment.”

— Marshall McLuhan

32. “Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.”

— Marshall McLuhan

33. “Any breakdown is a breakthrough.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

35. “The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.”

— Marshall McLuhan

36. “One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There’s always more than you can cope with.”

— Marshall McLuhan

37. “The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.”

— Marshall McLuhan

38. “When information overload occurs, pattern recognition is how to determine truth.”

— Marshall McLuhan

39. “The age of automation is going to be the age of “do it yourself”.”

— Marshall McLuhan

40. “The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.”

— Marshall McLuhan

41. “Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.”

— Marshall McLuhan

42. “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

43. “A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.”

— Marshall McLuhan

44. “The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

46. “In large measure, writing is the spatialization of thought.”

— Marshall McLuhan

47. “Like primitive, we now live in a global village of our own making, a simultaneous happening. It doesn’t necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else’s affairs.”

— Marshall McLuhan

48. “Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.”

— Marshall McLuhan

49. “Only the vanquished remember history.”

— Marshall McLuhan

50. “There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

— Marshall McLuhan