Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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The public has yet to see TV as TV. Broadcasters have no awareness of its potential. The movie people are just beginning to get a grasp on film.
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The automated presidential surrogate is the superlative nobody. (p. 157)
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Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience. (p. 171)
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If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.
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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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The world of the Greeks illustrates why visual appearances cannot interest people before the interiorization of alphabetic technology. (p. 61)
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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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One touch of nature makes the whole world tin.
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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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A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses. (p. 49)
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The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the ground rules of the environment. The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serves as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. (p. 93)
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The dyslexic: Everyman as cubist.
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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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The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.
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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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The media themselves are the avant-garde of our society. Avant-garde no longer exists in painting, music and poetry, it's the media themselves.
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Formal logic and the logical syllogism encapsulate connectedness in reasoning.
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There are no connections in resonant space. There are only interfaces and metamorphoses. (p. 75)
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Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement. (p. 113)
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The field of 'information theory' began by using the old hardware paradigm of transportation of data from point to point.
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All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.
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The newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem, environmental and invisible, as poem.
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For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning. (p. 126)