Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with.
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We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture. (p. 16)
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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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Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies. (p. 114)
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The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for experimental exploration – the technique of the suspended judgement. (p. 81)
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Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.
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A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
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The book is a private confessional form that provides a 'point of view.'
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Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
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New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.
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The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.
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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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In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner. (p. 4)
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Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
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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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The 'tragic flaw' is not a detail of characterization, a mere 'fly in the ointment', but a structural feature of ordinary consciousness. (p.45)
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Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.
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Gutenberg made all history available as classified data: the transportable book brought the world of the dead into the space of the gentlemen's library; the telegraph brought the entire world of the living to the workman's breakfast table. (p. 15)
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The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world. (p. 21)
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Older cliches are retrieved both as inherent principles that inform the new ground and new awareness, and as archetypal nostalgia figures with transformed meaning in relation to the new ground.
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The sheer increase in the quantity of information movement favoured the visual organization of knowledge and the rise of perspective even before typography. (p. 128)
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By involving all men in all men, by the electric extension of their own nervous systems, the new technology turns the figure of the primitive society into a universal ground that buries all previous figures. (p. 25)
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The print-made split between head and heart is the trauma which affects Europe from Machiavelli till the present. (p. 193)
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King Lear is a working model of the process of denudation by which men translate themselves from a world of roles to a world of jobs. (p. 16)