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We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

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
Shape
Tools
Shapes
Become
Behold

More quotes by Marshall McLuhan

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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.
Marshall McLuhan
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Nowadays there is no conversation at all. Teachers distrust talk as much as business men.
Marshall McLuhan
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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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The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos - resonant utterance or word.
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Primitivism has become the vulgar cliché of much modern art and speculation.
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Today, the mass audience (the successor to the public) can be used as a creative, participating force. It is, instead, merely given packages of passive entertainment. Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's questions.
Marshall McLuhan
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By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.
Marshall McLuhan
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Information and images bump against each other every day in massive quantities, and the resonance of this interfacing is like the babble of a village or tavern gossip session.
Marshall McLuhan
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Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener.
Marshall McLuhan
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In Tetrad form, the artifact is seen to be not neutral or passive, bur an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground.
Marshall McLuhan
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One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.
Marshall McLuhan
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Nobody can commit photography alone.
Marshall McLuhan
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I may be wrong, but I'm never in doubt.
Marshall McLuhan
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It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.
Marshall McLuhan
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Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, / Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? / That we by tracing magic lines are taught, / How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?
Marshall McLuhan
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The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb.
Marshall McLuhan
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It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds.
Marshall McLuhan
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Photography turns people into things and their image into a mass consumer product.
Marshall McLuhan
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The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by the electric media--movies, Telstar, flight--far surpassesany possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage.
Marshall McLuhan
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It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter.
Marshall McLuhan