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All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.

Marshall McLuhan

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Marshall McLuhan
Age: 69 †
Born: 1911
Born: July 21
Died: 1980
Died: December 31
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Edmonton
Alberta
Herbert Marshall McLuhan
Marshall MacLuhan
Marshall Mac Luhan
Lives
Perceptions
Arbitrary
Invest
Artificial
Perception
Exist
Media
Values

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Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force.
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Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.
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Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.
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I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.
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We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies.
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For those for whom the sex act has come to seem mechanical and merely the meeting and manipulation of body parts, there often remains a hunger which can be called metaphysical but which is not recognized as such, and which seeks satisfaction in physical danger, or sometimes in torture, suicide, or murder.
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The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
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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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Fish did not discover water.
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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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Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
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You can be a French Canadian or an English Canadian, but not a Canadian. We know how to live without an identity, and this is one of our marvellous resources.
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Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence.
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A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.
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Nowadays there is no conversation at all. Teachers distrust talk as much as business men.
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The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground.
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Artists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium or to release the power of another.
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Why is it so easy to acquire the solutions of past problems and so difficult to solve current ones
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The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures.
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Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses.
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