Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The automated presidential surrogate is the superlative nobody. (p. 157)
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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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Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.
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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.
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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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In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud. (p. 94)
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The newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem, environmental and invisible, as poem.
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Typography extended its character to the regulation and fixation of languages. (p. 229)
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With Francis Bacon, Vico continuously asserts the claims of grammar as true science precisely because it has not yielded to specialism and method.
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Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.
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Without an anti-environment, all environments are invisible. (p. 33)
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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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Until more than two centuries after printing nobody discovered how to maintain a single tone or attitude throughout a prose composition. (p. 154)
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The Greeks encountered the confusion of tongues when numbers invaded Euclidean space. (p. 203)
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Literate man, civilized man, tends to restrict and to separate functions, whereas tribal man has freely extended the form of his body to include the universe. (p. 117)
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There are no connections in resonant space. There are only interfaces and metamorphoses. (p. 75)
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Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumour, and personal malice. (p. 24)
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Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind. (p. 67)
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The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. (p. 122)
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Formal logic and the logical syllogism encapsulate connectedness in reasoning.
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By electricity we have not been driven out of our senses so much as our senses have been driven out of us. (p. 375)
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It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. (p. 9)
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The Concept of Dread, by Soren Kierkegaard, appeared in 1844, first year of the commercial telegraph...It mentions the telegraph as a reason for dread and nowness or existenz.