"People don't actually read newspapers - they get into them every morning like a hot bath."
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Quote collection
Marshall McLuhan quotes (page 8 of 19)
376 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves."
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"I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form."
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"Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialise, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The 'expert' is the man who stays put."
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"First we shape our tools, thereafter they shape us"
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"A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it."
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"Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode - a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground."
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"The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber."
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"The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar."
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"In experimental art, men are given the exact specifications of coming violence to their own psyches from their own counter-irritant or technology... But the counter-irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit."
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"By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds."
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"Our permanent address is tommorrow."
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"There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening."
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"The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action."
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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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"Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth."
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"To say that "the camera cannot lie" is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practised in its name."
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"Education, which should be helping youth to understand and adapt to their revolutionary new environments, is instead being used merely as an instrument of cultural aggression."
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"Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think."
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"The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness."
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