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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
Live
Contemporary
Men
Task
Familiarly
Tasks
Literate
Ground
Minus
Figure
Predecessors
Figures
Confronting
Lived
Activities
Activity
Hidden
More quotes by Marshall McLuhan
I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.
Marshall McLuhan
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
Marshall McLuhan
The school system is the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.
Marshall McLuhan
There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.
Marshall McLuhan
Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.
Marshall McLuhan
We have be-come irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.
Marshall McLuhan
In experimental art, men are given the exact specifications of coming violence to their own psyches from their own counter-irritant or technology... But the counter-irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit.
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 family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by the electric media--movies, Telstar, flight--far surpassesany possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage.
Marshall McLuhan
Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.
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
Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
Marshall McLuhan
...the logic of the photograph is neither verbal nor syntactical, a condition which renders literary culture quite helpless to cope with the photograph.
Marshall McLuhan
Like primitive, we now live in a global village of our own making, a simultaneous happening. It doesn't necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else's affairs.
Marshall McLuhan
The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.
Marshall McLuhan
Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.
Marshall McLuhan
Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force.
Marshall McLuhan
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.
Marshall McLuhan
Any breakdown is a breakthrough.
Marshall McLuhan
Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.
Marshall McLuhan
