Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension.
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There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening. A chapter sub-heading attributed by McLuhan to Alfred North Whitehead
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With TV, came the icon, the inclusive image, the inclusive political posture or stance. (p. 191)
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It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.
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New media are new languages, their grammar and syntax yet unknown.
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On Jimmy Carter 'Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place.'
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Each tetrad gives the etymology of its subject, as an uttering or outering of the body physical or mental, and provides its anatomy in fourfold exegetical manner.
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By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.
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War has become the environment of our time if only because it is an accelerated form of innovation and education. (p. 381)
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Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.
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Print altered not only the spelling and grammar but the accentuation and inflection of languages, and made 'bad grammar' possible. (p. 263)
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Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground - situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.
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Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another. (p. 298)
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Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. We lose 'touch' without it. Visual space is the space of detachment.
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Bless Madison Ave for restoring the magical art of the cavemen to suburbia. (p. 130)
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When you move into a new area, a new territory and learn a new language, the language is not a new subject, it is an environment, it is total. (p. 105)
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We have become like the most primitive Palaeolithic man, once more global wanderers, but information gatherers rather than food gatherers. From now on the source of food, wealth and life itself will be information.
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The percept takes priority of the concept.
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Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog. (p. 48)
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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. (p. 201)
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I don't explain-I explore.
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The 'interface' of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism – a formula for blitz and metamorphosis. (p. 161)
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Money is a poor man's credit card.
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The Gutenberg galaxy was theoretically dissolved in 1905 with the discovery of curved space, but in practice it had been invaded by the telegraph two generations before that. (p. 286)