Top 300 Marshall McLuhan Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.”

— Marshall McLuhan

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

256. “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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

258. “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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

262. “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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

266. “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

267. “All media work us over completely.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— 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. “Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

277. “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

278. “Our permanent address is tommorrow.”

— Marshall McLuhan

279. “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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

282. “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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

284. “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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

287. “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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

289. “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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

292. “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

293. “The winner is one who knows when to drop out in order to get in touch.”

— Marshall McLuhan

294. “Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.”

— Marshall McLuhan

295. “The method of our time is to use not a single but multiple models for exploration...”

— Marshall McLuhan

296. “There is an impression abroad that literary folk are fast readers. Wine tasters are not heavy drinkers. Literary people read slowly because they sample the complex dimensions and flavors of words and phrases. They strive for totality not lineality. They are well aware that the words on the page have to be decanted with the utmost skill. Those who imagine they read only for “content” are illusioned.”

— Marshall McLuhan

297. “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

298. “Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.”

— Marshall McLuhan

299. “Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode – a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.”

— Marshall McLuhan

300. “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