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If it works, it's obsolete.

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
Obsolete
Innovation
Creativity
Works
Ideas

More quotes by Marshall McLuhan

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Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.
Marshall McLuhan
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The most human thing about us is our technology.
Marshall McLuhan
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The alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or stone, and quite another when set down on light papyrus.
Marshall McLuhan
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Current illusion is that science has abolished all natural laws.
Marshall McLuhan
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Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.
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There is an enormous redundancy in every well-written book. With a well-written book I only read the right-hand page and allow my mind to work on the left-hand page. With a poorly written book I read every word.
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Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
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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Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
Marshall McLuhan
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What goes on inside the school is an interruption of education.
Marshall McLuhan
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Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the Tower of Babel by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant tr
Marshall McLuhan
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The ignorance of how to use knowledge stockpiles exponentially.
Marshall McLuhan
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The school system is the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.
Marshall McLuhan
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A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.
Marshall McLuhan
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Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.
Marshall McLuhan
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Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion.
Marshall McLuhan
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While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.
Marshall McLuhan
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Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.
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
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In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.
Marshall McLuhan