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Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.

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
Superabundance
Obsolescence
Moment
Moments

More quotes by Marshall McLuhan

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Electronic man has no physical body.
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Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.
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First we shape our tools, thereafter they shape us
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Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.
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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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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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Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.
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Life. Consider the alternative.
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If it works, it's obsolete.
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The alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or stone, and quite another when set down on light papyrus.
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Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology.
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One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.
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Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.
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The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.
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In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.
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The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature...
Marshall McLuhan
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Most people are alive in an earlier time, but you must be alive in our own time.
Marshall McLuhan
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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.
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Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.
Marshall McLuhan
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Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.
Marshall McLuhan