Top 300 Marshall McLuhan Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “In the century of jazz we are likely to overlook the emergence of the waltz as a hot and explosive human expression that broke through the formal feudal barriers of courtly and choral dance styles.”

— Marshall McLuhan

302. “In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud.”

— Marshall McLuhan

303. “The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces.”

— Marshall McLuhan

304. “Nowadays there is no conversation at all. Teachers distrust talk as much as business men.”

— Marshall McLuhan

305. “The circuited city of the future will not be the huge hunk of concentrated real estate created by the railway. It will take on a totally new meaning under conditions of very rapid movement. It will be an information megalopolis.”

— Marshall McLuhan

306. “One matter Englishmen don’t think in the least funny is their happy consciousness of possessing a deep sense of humor.”

— Marshall McLuhan

307. “The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation.”

— Marshall McLuhan

308. “It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds.”

— Marshall McLuhan

309. “To say that a body or its gravitational field ‘bends in space’ in its vicinity is the discuss visual space in acoustic terms.”

— Marshall McLuhan

310. “The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds.”

— Marshall McLuhan

311. “Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.”

— Marshall McLuhan

312. “There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.”

— Marshall McLuhan

313. “It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it isolates single moments in time.”

— Marshall McLuhan

314. “Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.”

— Marshall McLuhan

315. “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

316. “Art is anything you can get away with.”

— Marshall McLuhan

317. “There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.”

— Marshall McLuhan

318. “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

319. “In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.”

— Marshall McLuhan

320. “Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions. Our “Age of Anxiety” is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools – with yesterday’s concepts.”

— Marshall McLuhan

321. “Delegated authority is lineal, visual, hierarchical. The authority of knowledge is nonlineal, nonvisual, and inclusive.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

323. “The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.”

— Marshall McLuhan

324. “Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the “content” of the other, obscuring the operation of both.”

— Marshall McLuhan

325. “Today’s child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up.”

— Marshall McLuhan

326. “As the Western world has invested every aspect of its waking life with visual order, with procedures and spaces that are uniform, continuous and connected, it has progressively alienated itself from needful involvement in its subconscious life.”

— Marshall McLuhan

327. “The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.”

— Marshall McLuhan

328. “Art is the sole means of grace in our fallen state.”

— Marshall McLuhan

329. “The modern mind, whether in its subconscious collective dream or in its intellectual citadel of vivid awareness, is a stage on which is contained and re-enacted the entire experience of the human race.”

— Marshall McLuhan

330. “Arists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium or to release the power of another.”

— Marshall McLuhan

331. “Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.”

— Marshall McLuhan

332. “In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.”

— Marshall McLuhan

333. “I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.”

— Marshall McLuhan

334. “We have to find the environments in which it will be possible to live with our new inventions.”

— Marshall McLuhan

335. “Our time is a time to cross barriers, for erasing old categories – for probing around. When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised, put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result.”

— Marshall McLuhan

336. “That outering or uttering of sense which is language and speech is a tool which “made it possible for man to accumulate experience and knowledge in a form that made easy transmission and maximum use possible.”

— Marshall McLuhan

337. “The misleading effect of books like George Orwell’s 1984 is to project into the future a state of affairs that already exists.”

— Marshall McLuhan

338. “The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology, on and through which the American way of life was formed.”

— Marshall McLuhan

339. “For the fragmented man creates the homogenized Western world, while oral societies are made up of people differentiated, not by their specialist skills or visible marks, but by their unique emotional mixes.”

— Marshall McLuhan

340. “Thus, as passivity becomes extreme in the bulk of society, a sizeable segment of citizens detaches itself from the dream-locked majority. As vulgarity and stupidity thicken, more and more people awaken to the intolerability of their condition. Much can be done to foster this state of awareness, even though little can be done directly to change the policies of those in control today of the media of communication.”

— Marshall McLuhan

341. “The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed countries.”

— Marshall McLuhan