Quote

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

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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
Poetry
Exposure
Mind
State
Mentality
Action
Vital
Art
Tension
Doe
Arts
Incorrigibly
Remain
Dialectical
America
Mere
Tensions
States
Exist
Inaccessible
Nothing

More quotes by Marshall McLuhan

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The huge advantage of Canada is its backwardness.
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Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
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Art is anything you can get away with.
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People don't actually read newspapers - they get into them every morning like a hot bath.
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The village had institutionalized all human functions in forms of low intensity.... Participation was high and organization was low. This is the formula for stability.
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The greatest propaganda in the world is our mother tongue, that is what we learn as children, and which we learn unconsciously. That shapes our perceptions for life. That is propaganda at its most extreme form.
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I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
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My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.
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For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
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The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.
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If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.
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Work does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.
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There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends.
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The user of the electric light - or a hammer, or a language, or a book - is the content. As such, there is a total metamorphosis of the user by the interface. It is the metamorphosis that I consider the message.
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Our technology forces us to live mythically
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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.
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Explore the situation. Statements are expendable. Don't keep on looking in the rearview mirror and defending the status quo which is outmoded the moment it happened.
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If it works, it's obsolete.
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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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Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.
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