Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture. (p. 168)
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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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Does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes? (p. 28)
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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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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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Money is just the poor man's credit card.
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When we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electric technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people. To survive one must study the habits of cannibals. (p. 261)
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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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At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology. (p. 300)
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Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space.
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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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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 are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
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Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.
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We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
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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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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 divorce of poetry and music was first reflected by the printed page. (p. 227)
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The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.
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The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos – resonant utterance or word.
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Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.
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The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
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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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Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.