Top 300 Marshall McLuhan Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

— Marshall McLuhan

52. “The medium, or process, of our time – electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action.”

— Marshall McLuhan

53. “All advertising advertises advertising.”

— Marshall McLuhan

54. “The story begins only when the book closes.”

— Marshall McLuhan

55. “Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

57. “The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement.”

— Marshall McLuhan

58. “Education is civil defence against media fallout.”

— Marshall McLuhan

59. “The mother tongue is propaganda.”

— Marshall McLuhan

60. “Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.”

— Marshall McLuhan

61. “I am an intellectual thug who has been slowly accumulating a private arsenal with every intention of using it. In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon. Every man of good will is the enemy of society.”

— Marshall McLuhan

62. “Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.”

— Marshall McLuhan

63. “Education, which should be helping youth to understand and adapt to their revolutionary new environments, is instead being used merely as an instrument of cultural aggression.”

— Marshall McLuhan

64. “Language is a form of organized stutter.”

— Marshall McLuhan

65. “The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.”

— Marshall McLuhan

66. “As a rule, I always look for what others ignore.”

— Marshall McLuhan

67. “The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.”

— Marshall McLuhan

68. “The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb.”

— Marshall McLuhan

69. “Violence is the quest for identity. When identity disappears with technological innovation, violence is the natural recourse.”

— Marshall McLuhan

70. “We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies.”

— Marshall McLuhan

71. “One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.”

— Marshall McLuhan

72. “In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.”

— Marshall McLuhan

73. “The new media are not bridges between man and nature; they are nature.”

— Marshall McLuhan

74. “The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.”

— Marshall McLuhan

75. “Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it’s just the beginning.”

— Marshall McLuhan

76. “Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.”

— Marshall McLuhan

77. “Even mud gives the illusion of depth.”

— Marshall McLuhan

78. “The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.”

— Marshall McLuhan

79. “The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

81. “The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.”

— Marshall McLuhan

82. “Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.”

— Marshall McLuhan

83. “The news automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself an immediate reality.”

— Marshall McLuhan

84. “If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves.”

— Marshall McLuhan

85. “The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.”

— Marshall McLuhan

86. “The poet, the artist, the sleuth, whoever sharpens our perception tends to antisocial; rarely ‘well adjusted,’ he cannot go along with currents and trends.”

— Marshall McLuhan

87. “Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.”

— Marshall McLuhan

88. “Since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human experience.”

— Marshall McLuhan

89. “Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.”

— Marshall McLuhan

90. “Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.”

— Marshall McLuhan

91. “Computers can do better than ever what needn’t be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.”

— Marshall McLuhan

92. “The artist is a person who is expert in the training of perception.”

— Marshall McLuhan

93. “Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity.”

— Marshall McLuhan

94. “The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.”

— Marshall McLuhan

95. “Information and images bump against each other every day in massive quantities, and the resonance of this interfacing is like the babble of a village or tavern gossip session.”

— Marshall McLuhan

96. “The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.”

— Marshall McLuhan

97. “Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.”

— Marshall McLuhan

98. “The greatest propaganda in the world is our mother tongue, that is what we learn as children, and which we learn unconsciously. That shapes our perceptions for life. That is propaganda at its most extreme form.”

— Marshall McLuhan

99. “People hope that if they scream loudly enough about “values” then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. Otherwise, why would they be screaming? Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity.”

— Marshall McLuhan

100. “Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America – not on the battlefields of Vietnam.”

— Marshall McLuhan