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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.

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
Canadian
French
English
Identity
Resources
Live
Without
Marvellous

More quotes by Marshall McLuhan

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I am not a culture critic because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world.
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I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.
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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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Our motor car is our supreme form of privacy when we are away from home.
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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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Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.
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Most people are alive in an earlier time, but you must be alive in our own time.
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Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.
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Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration.
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The ignorance of how to use knowledge stockpiles exponentially.
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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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Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.
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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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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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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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Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.
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One matter Englishmen don't think in the least funny is their happy consciousness of possessing a deep sense of humor.
Marshall McLuhan
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I may be wrong, but I'm never in doubt.
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Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.
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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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