Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Languages are environments to which the child related synesthetically. (p. 166)
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Only puny secrets need protection. Big secrets are protected by public incredulity. You can actually dissipate a situation by giving it maximal coverage. As to alarming people, that's done by rumours, not by coverage. (p. 92)
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In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.
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Language is a form of organized stutter.
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Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts.
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Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.
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The literate man is a sucker for propaganda...You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas.
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The twentieth century encounter between alphabetic and electronic forces of culture confers on the printed word a crucial role in staying the return to 'the Africa within.' (p. 51)
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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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History as she is harped. Rite words in rote order. (pp. 108-109)
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The unique innovation of the phonetic alphabet released the Greeks from the universal acoustic spill of tribal societies. (p. 70)
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The 'natural magic' of the camera obscura anticipated Hollywood in turning the spectacle of the external world into a consumer commodity or package. (p. 146)
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Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
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The new science of communication is percept, not concept. (p. 259)
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A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
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I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
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Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology. (p. 85)
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World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation. (p.66)
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One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system. (p. 298)
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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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Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
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We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of 'nature.' Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology.
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The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message. (p. 8)
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Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology. (p. 245)