Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life. (p. 177)
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The typographic logic created 'the outsider,' the alienated mass, as the type of integral, that is, intuitive and irrational, man. (p. 241)
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The new overkill is simply an extension of our nervous system into a total ecological service environment. Such a service environment can liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries as naturally as it sustains them. (p. 152)
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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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All words at every level of prose and poetry and all devices of language and speech derive their meaning from figure / ground relation.
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The percept takes priority of the concept.
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We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
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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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There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
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The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb. (p. 55)
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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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Language is a sense, like touch. (p. 271)
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The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature. (p. 14)
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I neither approve nor disapprove. I merely try to understand. Sexual freedom is as natural to newly tribalized youth as drugs.
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As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.'
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The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy. (p. 154)
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The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.
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The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.
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Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog. (p. 13)
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Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception.
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The logos of creation, 'And God Said ...' formed the basis of Christian interpretation of the 'Book of Nature.'
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While people are engaged in creating a totally different world, they always form vivid images of the preceding world. (p. 21)
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The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.
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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.