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First we build the tools, then they build 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
Tools
Build
Firsts
First

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Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.
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The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.
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Money is a poor man's credit card.
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Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology.
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Positively, the effect of speeding up temporal sequence is to abolish time, much as the telegraph and cable abolished space. Of course, the photograph does both.
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The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes.
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Anything that's popular is a rear-view image.
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In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.
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Only the vanquished remember history.
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Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.
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The most human thing about us is our technology.
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Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.
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The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.
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Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
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American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.
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One matter Englishmen don't think in the least funny is their happy consciousness of possessing a deep sense of humor.
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The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature...
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Transmitted at the speed of light, all events on this planet are simultaneous. In the electric environment of information all events are simultaneous, there is no time or space separating events.
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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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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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