Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.
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Cervantes confronted typographic man in the figure of Don Quixote. (p. 242)
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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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Unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitutes a total and near-instanteous transformation of culture, values and attitudes.
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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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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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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 criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.
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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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The logos of creation, 'And God Said ...' formed the basis of Christian interpretation of the 'Book of Nature.'
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The medium is the message.
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The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.
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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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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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Money is just the poor man's credit card.
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Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.
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Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.
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The telegraph press mosaic is acoustic space as much as an electric circus.
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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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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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The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.
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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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The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.