Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
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Marshall McLuhan

1911 – 1980 CE

The most controversial and most publicized 20th century English professor, philosopher, founding father of media theory study, visionary “global village” describer who 30 years before it was invented predicted the WWW and coined the term "surfing;” Marshall McLuhan was a popular figure in the 60’s but soon forgotten until the internet proved his predictions and confirmed the ever-increasing cultural influence of technology on culture, business, psychology, and politics. Inspired by G. K. Chesterton to become a Roman Catholic, he credited the Virgin Mary for giving him intellectual guidance. Warning against the dangers of ignoring the consequences of new inventions, his deep historical insights into how new technologies in the past influenced culture give a strong foundation for his analysis of current and soon-to-come technology leading to a “global theater,” a collective identity, "electronic interdependence" ending individualistic print culture, and the creation of a new, global, and ”tribal base.”

Eras

Sources

War and Peace in the Global Village

Unlisted Sources

The Mechanical Bride, 1951

Quotes by Marshall McLuhan (33 quotes)

“Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.”

Chapters: 17. True Leaders

Themes: Opinion

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“One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water.”

from War and Peace in the Global Village

Chapters: 36. The Small, Dark Light

Themes: Water

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“We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

Chapters: 38. Fruit Over Flowers

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“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.”

Chapters: 41. Distilled Life

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“Acoustic Space has the basic character of a sphere whose focus or center is simultaneously everywhere and whose margin is nowhere.”

Chapters: 45. Complete Perfection

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“All words, in every language, are metaphors.”

Chapters: 56. One with the Dust

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“Come into my parlor said the spider to the specialist.”

Chapters: 57. Wu Wei

Themes: Livelihood

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“The story begins only when the book closes.”

Chapters: 65. Simplicity: the Hidden Power of Goodness

Themes: Books

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“Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.”

Chapters: 67. Three Treasures

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“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.”

Chapters: 71. Sick of Sickness

Themes: Reality Belief

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“Violence is the quest for identity. When identity disappears with technological innovation, violence is the natural recourse.”

Chapters: 74. The Great Executioner

Themes: Technology

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“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

Chapters: 80. A Golden Age

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“First we build the tools, then they build us.”

Chapters: 80. A Golden Age

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“These self-amputations which we call new technologies generate vast new environments against which the individual organism is quite helpless.”

from War and Peace in the Global Village

Themes: Technology

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“Song itself is a slowing down of speech... There is no melody in primiteive or Oriental music because the road of song is a continuum known only to literate man.”

from War and Peace in the Global Village

Themes: Continuity Music

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“When a new technology strikes a society, the most natural reaction is to clutch at the immediately preceding period for familiar and comforting images.”

from War and Peace in the Global Village

Themes: Change

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“Advertisers discovered that real news is bad news, that good news gets very little attention.”

from War and Peace in the Global Village

Themes: Consumerism

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“any man-made environment is a conditioner that creates non-perceptive somnambulists.”

from War and Peace in the Global Village

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“The Civil War delayed the abolition of slavery.”

from War and Peace in the Global Village

Themes: Slavery

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“Joyce was not only the greatest behavioral engineer who ever lived, he was one of the funniest men, rearranging the most commonplace items to produce hilarity and insight”

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“For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For tehnological man, it is time that occupies the same role.”

from The Mechanical Bride, 1951

Themes: Time

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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.”

from The Mechanical Bride, 1951

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“Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.”

Themes: Entertainment

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“Napoleon's dream of a continental system makes him father of the European Common Market... Where his armies went, right-hand driving has remained... He never got to England and they still drive on the left-hand side.”

from War and Peace in the Global Village

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“War is the principle motivational force for the development of science at every level... all the significant discoveries about the natural world have been inspired by the real or imaginary military necessities of their epochs... war has always provided the basic incentive.”

from War and Peace in the Global Village

Themes: Science War

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“The anesthetic made possible fiendish human torments that transferred all the human pain to convalescence. With anesthetics, what was really new was convalescence.”

from War and Peace in the Global Village

Themes: Health Medicine

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“To the Russian, the exciting event in Pavlov's experiment was not the conditioning of the dogs but of the laboratories. But to the Westerner, the revelation that he was a preconditioned robot... was a most disagreeable discovery.”

from War and Peace in the Global Village

Themes: Free Will Slavery

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“The United States is by far the most visually organized country in the history of the world. It is the only country that was ever founded on the basis of phonetic literacy for all. All of its political and business institutions assume the ground plan of this literacy.”

from War and Peace in the Global Village

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“the social effects of fighting a war by railway... just as every citizen had been a worker, every citizen became a soldier. Previous wars had had no such scope.”

from War and Peace in the Global Village

Themes: Warriors

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“The way to keep up is to be ahead. (Start with the 'other' man's ignorance–not his knowledge.)”

from War and Peace in the Global Village

Themes: Competition

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“To mention the Beatles is to evoke an image of non-melodic, Oriental, and environmental resonance.”

from War and Peace in the Global Village

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“Along with the computer it [the television] has altered every phase of the Amerian vision and identity.”

from War and Peace in the Global Village

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“The world of advertisements has for a century been a frank declaration of war on the community of customers... masochistic self-immolation on the part of advertisers.”

from War and Peace in the Global Village

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