Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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.
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In tetrad form, the artefact is seen to be not netural or passive, but an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground.
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Computers can do better than ever what needn’t be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly. (p. 109)
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The divorce of poetry and music was first reflected by the printed page. (p. 227)
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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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Money is just the poor man's credit card.
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The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.
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The print-made split between head and heart is the trauma which affects Europe from Machiavelli till the present. (p. 193)
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In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner. (p. 4)
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The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.
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The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images. (p. 360)
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Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.
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The telegraph press mosaic is acoustic space as much as an electric circus.
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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 logos of creation, 'And God Said ...' formed the basis of Christian interpretation of the 'Book of Nature.'
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Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.
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The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.
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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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Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.
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The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization of knowledge.
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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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PLAYBOY: A Columbia coed was recently quoted in Newsweek as equating you and LSD. 'LSD doesn’t mean anything until you consume it,' she said. 'Likewise McLuhan.' Do you see any similarities?
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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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There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.