Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The stock market was created by the telegraph and the telephone, and its panics are engineered by carefully orchestrated stories in the press. (p. 106)
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When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized. (p. 47)
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The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it’s the universal experience of TV watchers.
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Jokes are grievances.
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The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.
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Our senses are not receptors so much as reactors and makers of different modalities of space. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind. (p. 256)
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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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Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.
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The percept takes priority of the concept.
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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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Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.
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Marx shared with economists then and since the inability to make his concepts include innovational processes. It is one thing to spot a new product but quite another to observe the invisible new environments generated by the action of the product on a variety of pre-existing social grounds. (p. 63)
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Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.
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Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.
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Language is a sense, like touch. (p. 271)
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Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.
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Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class. (p. 136)
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Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.
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There is no connection between the elements in an electric world, which is equivalent to being surrounded by the human unconscious. (p. 260)
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The medium is the message.
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The manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels. (p. 99)
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Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped. (p. 309)
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The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature. (p. 14)
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As the totem pole is tied to the lineality of the missionaries' Bible, so the igloo was made possible by the primus stove.