Top 300 Marshall McLuhan Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.”

— Marshall McLuhan

102. “Invention is the mother of necessities.”

— Marshall McLuhan

103. “The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

— Marshall McLuhan

104. “Fish did not discover water.”

— Marshall McLuhan

105. “The real news is bad news.”

— Marshall McLuhan

106. “Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.”

— Marshall McLuhan

107. “People don’t actually read newspapers – they get into them every morning like a hot bath.”

— Marshall McLuhan

108. “All the new media are art forms which have the power of imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions.”

— Marshall McLuhan

109. “The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

111. “As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of ‘do it yourself.’”

— Marshall McLuhan

112. “The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.”

— Marshall McLuhan

113. “Television is teaching all the time. Does more educating than the schools and all the institutions of higher learning.”

— Marshall McLuhan

114. “Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.”

— Marshall McLuhan

115. “Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s problems.”

— Marshall McLuhan

116. “The new is always made up of the old, or rather, what people see in the new is always the old thing. The rear-view mirror. The future of the future is the present, and this is something that people are terrified of.”

— Marshall McLuhan

117. “Good taste is the first refuge of the non creative. It is the last ditch stand of the artist.”

— Marshall McLuhan

118. “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

119. “Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.”

— Marshall McLuhan

120. “American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver’s license age than at voting age.”

— Marshall McLuhan

121. “Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on.”

— Marshall McLuhan

122. “All words, in every language, are metaphors.”

— Marshall McLuhan

123. “It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.”

— Marshall McLuhan

124. “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.”

— Marshall McLuhan

125. “When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.”

— Marshall McLuhan

126. “You can be a French Canadian or an English Canadian, but not a Canadian. We know how to live without an identity, and this is one of our marvellous resources.”

— Marshall McLuhan

127. “Everybody at the speed of light tends to become a nobody.”

— Marshall McLuhan

128. “Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.”

— Marshall McLuhan

129. “The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.”

— Marshall McLuhan

130. “Life. Consider the alternative.”

— Marshall McLuhan

131. “The laws of the media, in tetrad form, bring logos and formal cause up to date to reveal analytically the structure of all human artefacts.”

— Marshall McLuhan

132. “Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery – to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms.”

— Marshall McLuhan

133. “Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.”

— Marshall McLuhan

134. “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

135. “Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person’s car is the only place where he can be alone and think.”

— Marshall McLuhan

136. “As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.”

— Marshall McLuhan

137. “In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.”

— Marshall McLuhan

138. “Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

140. “In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation.”

— Marshall McLuhan

141. “The huge advantage of Canada is its backwardness.”

— Marshall McLuhan

142. “Nobody can commit photography alone.”

— Marshall McLuhan

143. “Homer’s Iliad was the cultural encyclopedia of pre-literate Greece, the didactic vehicle that provided men with guidance for the management of their spiritual, ethical, and social lives.”

— Marshall McLuhan

144. “Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium. With the omnipresent ear and the moving eye, we have abolished writing, the specialized acoustic-visual metaphor that established the dynamics of Western civilization.”

— Marshall McLuhan

145. “A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.”

— Marshall McLuhan

146. “Education in a technological world of replaceable and expendable parts is neuter.”

— Marshall McLuhan

147. “Most clear writing is a sign that there is no exploration going on. Clear prose indicates the absence of thought.”

— Marshall McLuhan

148. “Any ad consciously attended to is comical. Ads are not meant for conscious consumption. They are intended as subliminal pills for the subconsious in order to exercise an hypnotic spell, especially on sociologists.”

— Marshall McLuhan

149. “It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudosimplicities of brutal directness.”

— Marshall McLuhan

150. “The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos – resonant utterance or word.”

— Marshall McLuhan