Top 300 Marshall McLuhan Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Nobody can commit photography alone.”

— Marshall McLuhan

152. “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

153. “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

154. “The artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual attitudes.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

157. “All discoveries in art and science result from an accumulation of errors.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

160. “Art is the sole means of grace in our fallen state.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

162. “America is the only country ever founded on the printed word.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

164. “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

165. “Art is anything you can get away with.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

167. “Arists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium or to release the power of another.”

— Marshall McLuhan

168. “A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.”

— Marshall McLuhan

169. “Today’s child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns subjects, and schedules.”

— Marshall McLuhan

170. “A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.”

— Marshall McLuhan

171. “Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the “Tower of Babel” by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant tr.”

— Marshall McLuhan

172. “It has always been the artist who realizes that the future is the present and uses his work to prepare the grounds for it.”

— Marshall McLuhan

173. “A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.”

— Marshall McLuhan

174. “When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result.”

— Marshall McLuhan

175. “Radio affects most intimately, person-to-perso n, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener.”

— Marshall McLuhan

176. “Today’s child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up – thatis our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice.”

— Marshall McLuhan

177. “We impose the form of the old on the content of the new.”

— Marshall McLuhan

178. “Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.”

— Marshall McLuhan

179. “Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion...”

— Marshall McLuhan

180. “The ignorance of how to use knowledge stockpiles exponentially.”

— Marshall McLuhan

181. “I am curious to know what would happen if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one’s psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties...”

— Marshall McLuhan

182. “The most human thing about us is our technology.”

— Marshall McLuhan

183. “Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration.”

— Marshall McLuhan

184. “Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy.”

— Marshall McLuhan

185. “Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.”

— Marshall McLuhan

186. “The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by the electric media – movies, Telstar, flight – far surpassesany possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world’s a sage.”

— Marshall McLuhan

187. “In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.”

— Marshall McLuhan

188. “The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.”

— Marshall McLuhan

189. “Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

191. “Transmitted at the speed of light, all events on this planet are simultaneous. In the electric environment of information all events are simultaneous, there is no time or space separating events.”

— Marshall McLuhan

192. “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

193. “When information rubs against information the results are startling and effective. The perrenial quest for involvement, fill-in, takes many forms.”

— Marshall McLuhan

194. “What we call art would seem to be specialist artifacts for enhancing human perception.”

— Marshall McLuhan

195. “The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes.”

— Marshall McLuhan

196. “Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force.”

— Marshall McLuhan

197. “Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.”

— Marshall McLuhan

198. “The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.”

— Marshall McLuhan

199. “In the age of instant information man ends his job of fragmented specializing and assumes the role of information-gathering. Today information-gathering resumes the inclusive concept of “culture” exactly as the primitive food-gatherer worked in complete equilibrium with his entire environment. Our quarry now, in this new nomadic and “workless” world, is knowledge and insight into the creative processes of life and society.”

— Marshall McLuhan

200. “Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brainwashing.”

— Marshall McLuhan