Top 300 Marshall McLuhan Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness.”

— Marshall McLuhan

202. “Students of media are persistently attacked as evaders, idly concentrating on means or processes rather than on ‘substance’. The dramatic and rapid changes of ‘substance’ elude these accusers. Survival is not possible if one approaches his environment, the social drama, with a fixed, unchangeable point of view – the witless repetitive response to the unperceived.”

— Marshall McLuhan

203. “A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space.”

— Marshall McLuhan

204. “Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.”

— Marshall McLuhan

205. “In accepting an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame a few years ago, General David Sarnoff made this statement: “We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. 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

206. “To say that “the camera cannot lie” is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practised in its name.”

— Marshall McLuhan

207. “Don’t ask whether it is right or wrong. Instead try to find out what is going on.”

— Marshall McLuhan

208. “The movie, by sheer speeding up of the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configurations and structure.”

— Marshall McLuhan

209. “Why is it so easy to acquire the solutions of past problems and so difficult to solve current ones.”

— Marshall McLuhan

210. “Of the many unforeseen consequences of typography, the emergence of nationalism is, perhaps, the most familiar.”

— Marshall McLuhan

211. “If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist’s couch.”

— Marshall McLuhan

212. “Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.”

— Marshall McLuhan

213. “Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.”

— Marshall McLuhan

214. “What goes on inside the school is an interruption of education.”

— Marshall McLuhan

215. “In Tetrad form, the artifact is seen to be not neutral or passive, bur an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground.”

— Marshall McLuhan

216. “An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

218. “Clear prose indicates the absence of thought.”

— Marshall McLuhan

219. “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

220. “Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.”

— Marshall McLuhan

221. “New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.”

— Marshall McLuhan

222. “Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It’s called being mass man.”

— Marshall McLuhan

223. “It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.”

— Marshall McLuhan

224. “If people were able to be convinced that art is precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artists?”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

226. “There is no more great men; there is only great committees.”

— Marshall McLuhan

227. “If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire.”

— Marshall McLuhan

228. “All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.”

— Marshall McLuhan

229. “Electronic man has no physical body.”

— Marshall McLuhan

230. “Human perception is literally incarnation.”

— Marshall McLuhan

231. “Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition.”

— Marshall McLuhan

232. “Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. The groundrules, pervasive structure, and over-all patterns of environments elude easy perception.”

— Marshall McLuhan

233. “The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive.”

— Marshall McLuhan

234. “The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world is no longer a dream.”

— Marshall McLuhan

235. “All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You’re a nobody.”

— Marshall McLuhan

236. “It is possible to deal with the entire environment as a work of art.”

— Marshall McLuhan

237. “Positively, the effect of speeding up temporal sequence is to abolish time, much as the telegraph and cable abolished space. Of course, the photograph does both.”

— Marshall McLuhan

238. “Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.”

— Marshall McLuhan

239. “Affluence creates poverty.”

— Marshall McLuhan

240. “The genteel is a mighty catafalque of service-with-a-smile and flattering solicitude smothering every spontaneous movement of thought or feeling.”

— Marshall McLuhan

241. “The media have substituted themselves for the older world.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

243. “A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.”

— Marshall McLuhan

244. “Our motor car is our supreme form of privacy when we are away from home.”

— Marshall McLuhan

245. “Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world’s a sage.”

— Marshall McLuhan

246. “Those conspiracies that are too incredible to be believed, are by the same right, those which most often succeed.”

— Marshall McLuhan

247. “Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.”

— Marshall McLuhan

248. “If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.”

— Marshall McLuhan

249. “I don’t want them to believe me, I just want them to think.”

— Marshall McLuhan

250. “People who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.”

— Marshall McLuhan