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Human perception is literally incarnation.
Marshall McLuhan -
The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators. (p. 205)
Marshall McLuhan
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The Greeks encountered the confusion of tongues when numbers invaded Euclidean space. (p. 203)
Marshall McLuhan -
In Chinese, honesty is the figure of a man standing, physically standing, beside his work. That means honesty: a man stands by his work. Two things: figure / ground. (p. 314)
Marshall McLuhan -
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
Marshall McLuhan -
The 'interface' of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism – a formula for blitz and metamorphosis. (p. 161)
Marshall McLuhan -
Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.
Marshall McLuhan -
The Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings. (p. 14)
Marshall McLuhan
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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 -
Typography as the first mechanization of a handicraft is itself the perfect instance not of a new knowledge, but of applied knowledge. (p. 171)
Marshall McLuhan -
The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy. (p. 154)
Marshall McLuhan -
Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another. (p. 298)
Marshall McLuhan -
The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the new culture of individualism. (p. 233)
Marshall McLuhan -
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.
Marshall McLuhan
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When we put our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomadic state.
Marshall McLuhan -
The hot radio medium used in cool or nonliterate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment. (p. 30)
Marshall McLuhan -
My method is vertical rather than horizontal so the scenery does not change but the texture does.
Marshall McLuhan -
Invention is the mother of all necessities.
Marshall McLuhan -
In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.
Marshall McLuhan -
All words at every level of prose and poetry and all devices of language and speech derive their meaning from figure / ground relation.
Marshall McLuhan
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We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation. (xx)
Marshall McLuhan -
The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
Marshall McLuhan -
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)
Marshall McLuhan -
As the totem pole is tied to the lineality of the missionaries' Bible, so the igloo was made possible by the primus stove.
Marshall McLuhan