Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
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Languages are environments to which the child related synesthetically. (p. 166)
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History as she is harped. Rite words in rote order. (pp. 108-109)
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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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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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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 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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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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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 unique innovation of the phonetic alphabet released the Greeks from the universal acoustic spill of tribal societies. (p. 70)
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The culture-heroes of preliteracy and postliteracy alike are robots.
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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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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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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 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 new science of communication is percept, not concept. (p. 259)
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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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World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation. (p.66)
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The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message. (p. 8)
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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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Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.