Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Visual space is the space of detachment. Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. (p. 194)
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Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.
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Newton, and 'proper scientific method' after him, conducted attention to 'continuous description' of experimental phenomena instead of to causes.
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The uniformity and repeatability of print created the 'political arithmetic' of the seventeenth century and the 'hedonistic calculus' of the eighteenth. (p. 237)
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Typography as the first mechanization of a handicraft is itself the perfect instance not of a new knowledge, but of applied knowledge. (p. 171)
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Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.
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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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Violence is the effort to maintain and restore a weakened psyche. (p. 377)
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The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication...is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts.
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Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
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In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. (p. 125)
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Money is a poor man's credit card.
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Left hemisphere industrialism has blinded the Chinese to the effects of our alphabet: pattern recognition is in the right hemisphere.
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The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures.
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Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.
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The magic of the cave image lies in its being, not in its being seen. The symbolic does not refer. It is. (p. 350)
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Dantzig explains why the language of number had to be increased to meet the needs created by the new technology of letters. (p. 200)
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Language alone includes all the senses in interplay at all times. (p. 253)
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In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.
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Invention is the mother of all necessities.
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The Greek 'point of view' in both art and chronology has little in common with ours but was much like that of the Middle Ages. (p. 64)
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Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.
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To say that a body or its gravitational field 'bends in space' in its vicinity is the discuss visual space in acoustic terms.
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Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode – a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.