Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.
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When Coleridge said that all men are born either Platonists or Aristotelians, he was saying that all men tend to be either acoustic or visual in their sensory bias.
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Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration.
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The city no longer exists except as a cultural ghost for tourists. Any highway eatery with its TV set, newspaper and magazine is as cosmopolitan as New York or Paris. (p.12)
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Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.
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Boyoboy oboyoboy oboyoboyoboyoboyoboyoboy...
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We are not Argus-eyed, but Argus-eared.
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All of man's artefacts, whether hardware or software, whether bulldozers or laws of chemistry, are alike linguistic in structure and intent. (p. 227)
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Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
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I am a pattern watcher. (p. 311)
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Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
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Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.
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Formal cause, as logos, incorporates the patterns of side-effects as part of essential nature: tetrads restore poesis and the making process to the study of artefacts.
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The culture-heroes of preliteracy and postliteracy alike are robots.
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The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground.
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Current concern with reading and spelling reform steers away from visual to auditory stress. (p. 54)
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In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin. (p. 47)
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Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness.
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The mask, like the side-show freak, is mainly participatory rather than pictorial in its sensory appeal. (p. 352)
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We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
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It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter.
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History as she is harped. Rite words in rote order. (pp. 108-109)
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Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence. (p. 186)
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The coverage is the war. If there were no coverage, there'd be no war. Yes, the newsmen and the mediamen around the world are actually the fighters, not the soldiers anymore.