"Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition."
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Quote collection
Marshall McLuhan quotes (page 4 of 19)
376 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Education is civil defence against media fallout."
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"Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior."
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"The greatest propaganda in the world is our mother tongue, that is what we learn as children, and which we learn unconsciously. That shapes our perceptions for life. That is propaganda at its most extreme form."
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"Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence."
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"During the Second War, the U.S.O. sent special issues of the principal American magazines to the Armed Forces, with the ads omitted. The men insisted on having the ads back again. Naturally. The ads are by far the best part of any magazine or newspaper. More pains and thought, more wit and art go into the making of an ad than into any prose feature of press or magazine. Ads are news. What is wrong with them is that they are always good news."
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"Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness."
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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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""Work" does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work."
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"Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century."
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"Television is teaching all the time. Does more educating than the schools and all the institutions of higher learning."
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"Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam."
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"Art is anything you can get away with."
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"Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher."
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"The percept takes priority of the concept."
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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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"Affluence creates poverty."
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"Time’ has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village... a simultaneous happening"
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"The new is always made up of the old, or rather, what people see in the new is always the old thing. The rear-view mirror. The future of the future is the present, and this is something that people are terrified of."
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"The electric age ... established a global network that has much the character of our central nervous system."
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