Top 300 Marshall McLuhan Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

255. “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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

259. “Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment – of what’s really going on – affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions.”

— Marshall McLuhan

260. “War and the fear of war have always been considered the main incentives to technological extension of our bodies. Indeed, Lewis Mumford, in his The City in History, considers the walled city itself an extension of our skins, as much as housing and clothing. More even than the preparation for war, the aftermath of invasion is a rich technological period; because the subject culture has to adjust all its sense ratios to accommodate the impact of the invading culture.”

— Marshall McLuhan

261. “Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.”

— Marshall McLuhan

262. “As the age of information demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved.”

— Marshall McLuhan

263. “Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology.”

— Marshall McLuhan

264. “When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.”

— Marshall McLuhan

265. “Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses.”

— Marshall McLuhan

266. “Einstein pronounced the doom of continuous or ‘rational’ space, and the way was made clear for Picasso and the Marx Brothers and Mad magazine.”

— Marshall McLuhan

267. “By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.”

— Marshall McLuhan

268. “Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.”

— Marshall McLuhan

269. “Innovation for holders of conventional wisdom is not novelty but annihilation.”

— Marshall McLuhan

270. “Our permanent address is tommorrow.”

— Marshall McLuhan

271. “The Newtonian God – the God who made a clock-like universe, wound it, and withdrew – died a long time ago. This is what Nietzsche meant and this is the God who is being observed.”

— Marshall McLuhan

272. “The school system is the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.”

— Marshall McLuhan

273. “I am not a “culture critic” because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world.”

— Marshall McLuhan

274. “The victory over Euclidean space was not achieved by isolated individuals, but by a field of young rebels opposed to all absolutes.”

— Marshall McLuhan

275. “The alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or stone, and quite another when set down on light papyrus.”

— Marshall McLuhan

276. “Current illusion is that science has abolished all natural laws.”

— Marshall McLuhan

277. “Explore the situation. Statements are expendable. Don’t keep on looking in the rearview mirror and defending the status quo which is outmoded the moment it happened.”

— Marshall McLuhan

278. “The ‘expert’ is the man who stays put.”

— Marshall McLuhan

279. “It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head.”

— Marshall McLuhan

280. “To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.”

— Marshall McLuhan

281. “Some of my fellow academics are very hostile, but I sympathize with them. They’ve been asleep for 500 years and they don’t like anybody who comes along and stirs them up.”

— Marshall McLuhan

282. “All media work us over completely.”

— Marshall McLuhan

283. “The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.”

— Marshall McLuhan

284. “Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.”

— Marshall McLuhan

285. “The public has yet to see TV as TV. Broadcasters have no awareness of its potential. The movie people are just beginning to get a grasp on film.”

— Marshall McLuhan

286. “I’ve always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened.”

— Marshall McLuhan

287. “The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground.”

— Marshall McLuhan

288. “Jack Paar mentioned that he once had said to a young friend, “Why do you kids use ‘cool’ to mean ‘hot’?” The friend replied, “Because you folks used up the word ‘hot’ before we came along.”

— Marshall McLuhan

289. “The rythms of typing favour short, concise sentences, sentences with oral form.”

— Marshall McLuhan

290. “The modern nose, like the modern eye, has developed a sort of microscopic, intercellular intensity which makes our human contactspainful and revolting.”

— Marshall McLuhan

291. “Language is metaphor in the sense that it not only stores but translates experience from one mode into another. Money is metaphor in the sense that it stores skill and labour and also translates one skill into another.”

— Marshall McLuhan

292. “Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental.”

— Marshall McLuhan

293. “The “child” was an invention of the 17th century; he did not exist in, say, Shakespeare’s day. He had, up until that time, been merged in the adult world and there was nothing that could be called childhood in our sense.”

— Marshall McLuhan

294. “The user of the electric light – or a hammer, or a language, or a book – is the content. As such, there is a total metamorphosis of the user by the interface. It is the metamorphosis that I consider the message.”

— Marshall McLuhan

295. “Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.”

— Marshall McLuhan

296. “Most people are alive in an earlier time, but you must be alive in our own time.”

— Marshall McLuhan

297. “The present is only faced in any generation by the artist.”

— Marshall McLuhan

298. “The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.”

— Marshall McLuhan

299. “The only way to recover the old world is to induce the media into vomiting it back up.”

— Marshall McLuhan

300. “Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.”

— Marshall McLuhan