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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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Most people are alive in an earlier time, but you must be alive in our own time.
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What goes on inside the school is an interruption of education.
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Today, the mass audience (the successor to the public) can be used as a creative, participating force. It is, instead, merely given packages of passive entertainment. Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's questions.
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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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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 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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Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion.
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Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
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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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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.
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Any breakdown is a breakthrough.
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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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Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
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Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
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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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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?
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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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Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.
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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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Anything that's popular is a rear-view image.
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