Top 300 Marshall McLuhan Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “Anything that’s popular is a rear-view image.”

— Marshall McLuhan

153. “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

154. “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

155. “The ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium.”

— Marshall McLuhan

156. “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

157. “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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

161. “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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

163. “The wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing an extension of the skin, electric circuitry an extension of the central nervous system.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

165. “All media are extensions of some human faculty- psychic or physical.”

— Marshall McLuhan

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

171. “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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

173. “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

174. “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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

178. “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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

180. “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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

182. “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

183. “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

184. “What is very little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software.”

— Marshall McLuhan

185. “The percept takes priority of the concept.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

187. “We have be-come irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

189. “A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters.”

— Marshall McLuhan

190. “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

191. “Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.”

— Marshall McLuhan

192. “Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very week identity.”

— Marshall McLuhan

193. “Canadians are the people who learned to live without the bold accents of the natural ego-trippers of other lands.”

— Marshall McLuhan

194. “There is an enormous redundancy in every well-written book. With a well-written book I only read the right-hand page and allow my mind to work on the left-hand page. With a poorly written book I read every word.”

— Marshall McLuhan

195. “The student of media soon comes to expect the New Media of any period whatever to be classed as ‘pseudo’ by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be.”

— Marshall McLuhan

196. “Jokes are grievances.”

— Marshall McLuhan

197. “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

198. “North Americans have a peculiar bias. They go outside to be alone and they go home to be social.”

— Marshall McLuhan

199. “Photography turns people into things and their image into a mass consumer product.”

— Marshall McLuhan

200. “Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.”

— Marshall McLuhan