Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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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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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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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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Languages are environments to which the child related synesthetically. (p. 166)
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The new science of communication is percept, not concept. (p. 259)
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Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
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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 book is a private confessional form that provides a 'point of view.'
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We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
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Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society. (p. 271)
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The media have substituted themselves for the older world.
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For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
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Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology. (p. 245)
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Nobody can doubt that the entire range of applied science contributes to the very format of a newspaper. But the headline is a feature which began with the Napoleonic Wars. The headline is a primitive shout of rage, triumph, fear, or warning, and newspapers have thrived on wars ever since.
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Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.
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The user is the content of any situation, whether its driving a car, or wearing clothes or watching a show. The user is content.
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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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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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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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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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A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.
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Paradox is the technique for seizing the conflicting aspects of any problem. Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant. (p. 106)
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The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.