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Violence is the quest for identity. When identity disappears with technological innovation, violence is the natural recourse.

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
Technological
Disappear
Innovation
Identity
Violence
Recourse
Natural
Disappears
Quests
Quest

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The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
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The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement.
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Affluence creates poverty.
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Photography turns people into things and their image into a mass consumer product.
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Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.
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If people were able to be convinced that art is precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artists?
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In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.
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Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up--thatis our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice.
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All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
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Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.
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We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
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Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener.
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One main condition of aristocratic life was present in the South and not in the North--personal responsibility to other human beings for education and material welfare. (A Carnegie or a Ford, like a bureaucracy, molds the lives of millions without taking any responsibility.)
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Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher.
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... Their power to see environments as they really are.
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It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it isolates single moments in time.
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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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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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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.
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In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.
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