To say that "the camera cannot lie" is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practised in its name.
Marshall McluhanRead
We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
Interpretation
We often rely on our past experiences to navigate our future choices.
Marshall McLuhan's quote emphasizes the idea that our understanding of the future is heavily influenced by our past. Just as a driver uses a rearview mirror to see behind them, we use our past experiences and knowledge to inform and guide our decisions as we move forward in life. This illustrates both the limitations and insights we gain from history as we attempt to shape our future.
In practice
In a motivational speech about learning from failure, you could use this quote to emphasize the importance of past lessons.
To say that "the camera cannot lie" is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practised in its name.
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.
The news automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself an immediate reality.
Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.
The poet, the artist, the sleuth, whoever sharpens our perception tends to antisocial; rarely 'well adjusted,' he cannot go along with currents and trends.
In this life struggle, here I am among you fully cognizant that a true believer has no fear of what God has ordained for him. Those who are visited by fear live only for their present, under the illusion that the world began with them and will end with their departure.
When I appeared before the draft board examiner during World War II, he asked me if I thought I could kill. "I don't know about strangers," I replied, "but friends, certainly."
You are an educated man. You know there are no such things as demons." Bast smiled a terrible smile. "There is only my kind." Bast leaned closer still, Chronicler smelled flowers on his breath. "You are not wise enough to fear me as I should be feared. You do not know the first note of the music that moves me.
Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.
Probably Hobbes got it right when he said that a leviathan, a third party with a monopoly on the use of legitimate use of force in a territory, might be among the biggest violence reduction techniques ever invented.
If you can see the terrorists as a relative who's dangerously sick and we have to give them medicine and the medicine is love and compassion. There's nothing better.
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