Top 300 Marshall McLuhan Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “We have be-come irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.”

— Marshall McLuhan

202. “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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

204. “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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

207. “Jokes are grievances.”

— Marshall McLuhan

208. “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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

211. “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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

233. “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

234. “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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

236. “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

237. “Human perception is literally incarnation.”

— Marshall McLuhan

238. “Affluence creates poverty.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

241. “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

242. “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

244. “Electronic man has no physical body.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

248. “The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

250. “As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art.”

— Marshall McLuhan