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Anything that's popular is a rear-view image.

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
Popular
Independence
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Anything
Rear

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Artists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium or to release the power of another.
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If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves.
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A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
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Clear prose indicates the absence of thought.
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There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends.
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I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form.
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Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy.
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Some of my fellow academics are very hostile, but I sympathize with them. They've been asleep for 500 years and they don't like anybody who comes along and stirs them up.
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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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Violence is the quest for identity. When identity disappears with technological innovation, violence is the natural recourse.
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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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Money is a poor man's credit card.
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The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds.
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The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.
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Invention is the mother of necessities.
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Innovation for holders of conventional wisdom is not novelty but annihilation.
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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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Any breakdown is a breakthrough.
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The ignorance of how to use knowledge stockpiles exponentially.
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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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