Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Casting my perils before swains.
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The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.
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The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature. (p. 14)
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The unformulated message of an assembly of news items from every quarter of the globe is that the world today is one city. All war is civil war. All suffering is our own.
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Tactility is space of the interval.
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Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.
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The 4 aspects of each of the media actually constitute the four features of all metaphors. In other words, all human technologies whatever are, in the fullest sense, linguistic outerings, or utterings, of man. (p. 275)
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We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
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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)
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Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.
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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.
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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.
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Environment is process, not container. (p. 30)
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Print created national uniformity and government centralism, but also individualism and opposition to government as such. (p. 267)
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Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama. (p. 275)
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Typography cracked the voices of silence. (p. 283)
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Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.
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The culture-heroes of preliteracy and postliteracy alike are robots.
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American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.
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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 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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Affluence creates poverty.
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The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
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We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.