Quotes by Mcluhan, Marshall

"Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness."

Mcluhan, Marshall on advertising
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"Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century."

Mcluhan, Marshall on advertising
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"The modern little red riding hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objections to being eaten by the wolf."

Mcluhan, Marshall on advertising
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"Money is a poor man's credit card."

Mcluhan, Marshall on debt
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"The school system, custodian of print culture, has no place for the rugged individual. It is, indeed, the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing."

Mcluhan, Marshall on education
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"American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age."

Mcluhan, Marshall on elections
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"Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies."

Mcluhan, Marshall on eloquence
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"A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion."

Mcluhan, Marshall on etiquette
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"Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior."

Mcluhan, Marshall on experience
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"The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist."

Mcluhan, Marshall on information
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"Jokes are grievances."

Mcluhan, Marshall on jokes and jokers
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"The real news is bad news."

Mcluhan, Marshall on journalism and journalists
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"Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression."

Mcluhan, Marshall on appetite
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"The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village."

Mcluhan, Marshall on media
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"The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium -- that is, of any extension of ourselves -- result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology."

Mcluhan, Marshall on media
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"Publication is a self-invasion of privacy."

Mcluhan, Marshall on media
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"Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy."

Mcluhan, Marshall on mental illness
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"The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers."

Mcluhan, Marshall on names
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"Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval."

Mcluhan, Marshall on obscurity
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"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding."

Mcluhan, Marshall on opinions
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"Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century."

Mcluhan, Marshall on art
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"Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen."

Mcluhan, Marshall on art
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"As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes."

Mcluhan, Marshall on art
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"The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete."

Mcluhan, Marshall on automobiles
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"The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man."

Mcluhan, Marshall on automobiles
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"Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it."

Mcluhan, Marshall on babies
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"Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be."

Mcluhan, Marshall on politics
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"The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times."

Mcluhan, Marshall on propaganda
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"If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch."

Mcluhan, Marshall on psychiatry
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"When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves."

Mcluhan, Marshall on sales
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"Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but, disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort."

Mcluhan, Marshall on sales
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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."

Mcluhan, Marshall on sex
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"A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new."

Mcluhan, Marshall on books - reading
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"It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudosimplicities of brutal directness."

Mcluhan, Marshall on candor
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"Good taste is the first refuge of the non creative. It is the last ditch stand of the artist."

Mcluhan, Marshall on taste
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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."

Mcluhan, Marshall on technology
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"For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role."

Mcluhan, Marshall on time
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"Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor."

Mcluhan, Marshall on work
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"The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns."

Mcluhan, Marshall on conformity
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"It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic."

Mcluhan, Marshall on criticism
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