Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation. (p. 362)
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My method is vertical rather than horizontal so the scenery does not change but the texture does.
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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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New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers. (p. 47)
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Violence is the effort to maintain and restore a weakened psyche. (p. 377)
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Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status. (p. 133)
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A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space. (p. 73)
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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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Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.
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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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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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Every technology contrived and 'outered' by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization. (p. 174)
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The most human thing about us is our technology.
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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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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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Affluence creates poverty.
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Poetry and the arts can’t exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind.
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With TV, came the icon, the inclusive image, the inclusive political posture or stance. (p. 191)
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The young are really the heirs to a generation of incompetence.
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Print, in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism. (p. 226)
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The medieval student had to be paleographer, editor, and publisher of the authors he read. (p. 109)
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Tactility is the space of the interval; acoustic space is spherical and resonant.
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When we put our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomadic state.