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First we shape our tools, thereafter they 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
Thereafter
Shape
Tools
Shapes
Firsts
First
More quotes by Marshall McLuhan
Artists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium or to release the power of another.
Marshall McLuhan
Invention is the mother of necessities.
Marshall McLuhan
For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
Marshall McLuhan
Don't ask whether it is right or wrong. Instead try to find out what is going on.
Marshall McLuhan
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
The public has yet to see TV as TV. Broadcasters have no awareness of its potential. The movie people are just beginning to get a grasp on film.
Marshall McLuhan
Poetry and the arts can’t exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind.
Marshall McLuhan
Jokes are grievances.
Marshall McLuhan
Violence is the quest for identity. When identity disappears with technological innovation, violence is the natural recourse.
Marshall McLuhan
Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the content of the other, obscuring the operation of both.
Marshall McLuhan
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.
Marshall McLuhan
We impose the form of the old on the content of the new.
Marshall McLuhan
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
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.
Marshall McLuhan
Nowadays there is no conversation at all. Teachers distrust talk as much as business men.
Marshall McLuhan
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.
Marshall McLuhan
Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.
Marshall McLuhan
Language is a form of organized stutter.
Marshall McLuhan
Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.
Marshall McLuhan
Innovation for holders of conventional wisdom is not novelty but annihilation.
Marshall McLuhan
