Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Chinese script is not visual but iconic and tactile. It does not disturb the tribal bonds. (p. 72)
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At the speed of light there is no sequence; everything happens at the same instant.
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Privacy invasion is now one of biggest knowledge industries. (p. 24)
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Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been...destroyed by sudden environmental change.
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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.
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Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering.
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War is never anything less than accelerated technological change. (p. 102)
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Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.
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Color is not so much a visual as a tactile medium.
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Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes. (p. 36)
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For me any of the little gestures I make are all tentative probes. That's why I feel free to make them sound as outrageous or extreme as possible. Until you make it extreme, the probe is not very efficient.
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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.
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After childhood, the senses specialize via the channels of dominant technologies and social weaponries.
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By surpassing writing, we have regained our wholeness, not on a national or cultural but cosmic plane.
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Sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal hoard. The box office looms as a return to the echo chamber of bardic incantation. (p. 288)
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My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.
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The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.
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Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.
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The city no longer exists except as a cultural ghost for tourists. Any highway eatery with its TV set, newspaper and magazine is as cosmopolitan as New York or Paris. (p.12)
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Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.
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We are not Argus-eyed, but Argus-eared.
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Boyoboy oboyoboy oboyoboyoboyoboyoboyoboy...
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Current concern with reading and spelling reform steers away from visual to auditory stress. (p. 54)
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I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.