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Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology.

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
Print
Express
Technology
Read
Men
Configurations
Configuration
Helpless

More quotes by Marshall McLuhan

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The media have substituted themselves for the older world.
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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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First we build the tools, then they build us.
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It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.
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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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Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
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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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Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
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The huge advantage of Canada is its backwardness.
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We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish.
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Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.
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Primitivism has become the vulgar cliché of much modern art and speculation.
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The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes.
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... Their power to see environments as they really are.
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Invention is the mother of necessities.
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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 user of the electric light - or a hammer, or a language, or a book - is the content. As such, there is a total metamorphosis of the user by the interface. It is the metamorphosis that I consider the message.
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For those for whom the sex act has come to seem mechanical and merely the meeting and manipulation of body parts, there often remains a hunger which can be called metaphysical but which is not recognized as such, and which seeks satisfaction in physical danger, or sometimes in torture, suicide, or murder.
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I may be wrong, but I'm never in doubt.
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There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.
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