Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters. (p. 245)
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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 photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.
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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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Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
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Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture.
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A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor? (p.7)
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Primitivism has become the vulgar cliche of much modern art and speculation. (p. 77)
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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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World War I a railway war of centralization and encirclement. World War II a radio war of decentralization concluded by the Bomb. World War III a TV guerrilla war with no divisions between civil and military fronts. (p. 152)
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All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.
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TV is not good at covering single events. It needs a ritual, a rhythm, and a pattern...TV tends to fosters patterns rather than events.
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Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography. (p. 149)
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Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.
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Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on. (p. 120)
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The reduction of the tactile qualities of life and language constitute the refinement sought in the Renaissance and repudiated now in the electronic age. (p. 272)
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There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.
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Literacy, in translating man out of the closed world of tribal depth and resonance, gave man an eye for an ear and ushered him into a visual open world of specialized and divided consciousness.
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The Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings. (p. 14)
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The comic strip: upholder of Homeric culture. (p.19)
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Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.
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Invention is the mother of all necessities.
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Typography extended its character to the regulation and fixation of languages. (p. 229)
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Interdeterminacy was a figure-ground problem arising from incongruity between the visual bias of classical science and the new acoustic sensibilities.