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We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.
Marshall McLuhan -
Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.
Marshall McLuhan
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Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.
Marshall McLuhan -
The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature...The new media are not ways of relating us to the old world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.
Marshall McLuhan -
The Greeks invented both their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization of the alphabet. (p. 66)
Marshall McLuhan -
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.
Marshall McLuhan -
The culture-heroes of preliteracy and postliteracy alike are robots.
Marshall McLuhan -
Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.
Marshall McLuhan
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Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.
Marshall McLuhan -
The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity. (p. 135)
Marshall McLuhan -
Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped. (p. 309)
Marshall McLuhan -
Writing turned a spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech; writing was the visualization of acoustic space. It lit up the dark. (p. 14)
Marshall McLuhan -
An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.
Marshall McLuhan -
Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama. (p. 275)
Marshall McLuhan
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We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
Marshall McLuhan -
Q: Do you feel a need to be distinctive and mass-produced? Q: Are you in the groove? That is, are you moving in ever-diminishing circles? Q: How often do you change your mind, your politics, your clothes? (p. 121-125)
Marshall McLuhan -
Jokes are grievances.
Marshall McLuhan -
Affluence creates poverty.
Marshall McLuhan -
The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.
Marshall McLuhan -
Environment is process, not container. (p. 30)
Marshall McLuhan
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Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.
Marshall McLuhan -
The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature. (p. 14)
Marshall McLuhan -
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)
Marshall McLuhan -
Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of 'what the public wants' played over its own nerves. (p. 68)
Marshall McLuhan