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The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground.
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
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Hidden
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Contemporary
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Familiarly
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Activities
More quotes by Marshall McLuhan
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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There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.
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When people become too intense, too serious, they will have trouble in relating to any sort of social game or norm. Perhaps this is why jokes are so important. On one hand they tell us about where the problems and grievances are, and, at the same time, they provide the means of enduring these grievances by laughing at the problems.
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We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
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People who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.
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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.
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Fish did not discover water.
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Photography turns people into things and their image into a mass consumer product.
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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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I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
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Information and images bump against each other every day in massive quantities, and the resonance of this interfacing is like the babble of a village or tavern gossip session.
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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.
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On Spaceship Earth there are no passengers everybody is a member of the crew. We have moved into an age in which everybody's activities affect everybody else.
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People hope that if they scream loudly enough about values then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. Otherwise, why would they be screaming? Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity.
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The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature...
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There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends.
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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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Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.
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The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
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Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception.
Marshall McLuhan
