Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Languages are environments to which the child related synesthetically. (p. 166)
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Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perception...When these ratios change, men change.
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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.
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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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The unique innovation of the phonetic alphabet released the Greeks from the universal acoustic spill of tribal societies. (p. 70)
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Language is a form of organized stutter.
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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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I am not a 'culture critic' because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world.
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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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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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Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information.
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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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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 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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The culture-heroes of preliteracy and postliteracy alike are robots.
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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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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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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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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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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 electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message. (p. 8)