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It has always been the artist who realizes that the future is the present and uses his work to prepare the grounds for it

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
Realizing
Future
Use
Artist
Realizes
Work
Grounds
Always
Uses
Prepare
Present

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The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.
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To say that the camera cannot lie is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practised in its name.
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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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the only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions
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Electronic man has no physical body.
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In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.
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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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The ignorance of how to use knowledge stockpiles exponentially.
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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.
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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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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.
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First we build the tools, then they build us.
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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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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.
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In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.
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The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.
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The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.
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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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