Top 79 Marcuse Quotes
#1. Marcuse also believed that sexuality was a political., an ideological, category, not found but made.
Richard A. Posner
#2. Marcuse wrote: "Perhaps an accident may alter the situation, but unless the recognition of what is being done and what is being prevented subverts the consciousness and the behavior of man, not even a catastrophe will bring about the change." ...
Daniel Pinchbeck
#3. The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.
Herbert Marcuse
#4. The ontological concept of truth is in the centre of a logic which may serve as a model of pre- technological rationality. It is the rationality of a two-dimensional universe of discourse which, contrasts with the of thought and behavior that develop in the execution of the technological project.
Herbert Marcuse
#5. The societal division of labor obtains the dignity of an ontological condition.
Herbert Marcuse
#6. In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference.
Herbert Marcuse
#7. The liberating force of technology the instrumentalization of things turns into ... the instrumentalization of man.
Herbert Marcuse
#8. The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies.
Herbert Marcuse
#9. Thought and speech are of a thinking and speaking subject, and if the life of the latter depends on the performance of a superimposed function, it depends on fulfilling the requirements of this function thus it depends on those who control these requirements.
Herbert Marcuse
#10. The present stage redefines the possibilities of man and nature in accordance with the new means available for their realization.
Herbert Marcuse
#13. Self-determination, the autonomy of the individual, asserts itself in the right to race his automobile, to handle his power tools, to buy a gun, to communicate to mass audiences his opinion, no matter how ignorant, how aggressive, it may be.
Herbert Marcuse
#14. This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression.
Herbert Marcuse
#15. Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.
Herbert Marcuse
#16. In conditions of private property ... "life-activity" stands in the service of property instead of property standing the service of free life-activity.
Herbert Marcuse
#17. Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another.
Herbert Marcuse
#18. Our mass media have little difficulty in selling particular interests as those of all sensible men. The political needs of society become individual needs and aspirations, their satisfaction promotes business and the commonweal, and the whole appeals to be the very embodiment of Reason.
Herbert Marcuse
#19. Preaching nonviolence on principle reproduces the existing institutionalized violence.
Herbert Marcuse
#20. The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual.
Herbert Marcuse
#21. The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.
Herbert Marcuse
#22. Behind the aesthetic form lies the repressed harmony of sensuousness and reason
Herbert Marcuse
#23. The unification of opposites which characterizes the commercial and political style is one of the many ways in which discourse and communication make themselves immune against the expression of protest and refusal.
Herbert Marcuse
#24. Bourgeois political economy ... never gets to see man who is its real subject. It disregards the essence of man and his history and is thus in the profoundest sense not a 'science of people' but of non-people and of an inhuman world of objects and commodities.
Herbert Marcuse
#25. This is the pure form of servitude: to exist as an instrument.
Herbert Marcuse
#26. At the highest stage of capitalism, the most necessary revolution appears as the most unlikely one.
Herbert Marcuse
#27. There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop.
Herbert Marcuse
#28. Society ... can afford to grant more than before because its interests have become the innermost drives of its citizens.
Herbert Marcuse
#29. The judgment that human life is worth living, or rather can and ought to be made worth living, ... underlies all intellectual effort; it is the a priori of social theory, and its rejection (which is perfectly logical) rejects theory itself.
Herbert Marcuse
#30. Every sound reason is on the side of law and order in their insistence that the eternity of joy be reserved for the hereafter, and in their endeavor to subordinate the struggle against death and disease to the never-ceasing requirements of national and international security.
Herbert Marcuse
#31. All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude, and the emergence of this consciousness is always hampered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions which, to a great extent, have become the individual's own.
Herbert Marcuse
#32. The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.
Herbert Marcuse
#33. The avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will.
Herbert Marcuse
#34. Our society distinguishes itself by conquering the centrifugal social forces with Technology rather than Terror, on the dual basis of an overwhelming efficiency and an increasing standard of living.
Herbert Marcuse
#35. The slaves of developed industrial civilization are sublimated slaves.
Herbert Marcuse
#36. The range of socially permissible and desirable satisfaction is greatly enlarged, but through this satisfaction, the Pleasure Principle is reduced deprived of the claims which are irreconcilable with the established society. Pleasure, thus adjusted, generates submission.
Herbert Marcuse
#37. The sickness of the individual is ultimately caused by and sustained by the sickness of his civilization
Herbert Marcuse
#38. Remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory.
Herbert Marcuse
#39. Such abstraction which refuses to accept the given universe of facts as the final context of validation, such "transcending" analysis of the facts in the light of their arrested and denied possibilities, pertains to the very structure of social theory.
Herbert Marcuse
#40. Contemporary industrial society is now characterised more than ever by the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity.
Herbert Marcuse
#41. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value counts. On it centers the rationality of the status quo, and all alien rationality is bent to It.
Herbert Marcuse
#42. The apparatus defeats its own purpose if its purpose is to create a humane existence on the basis of a humanized nature.
Herbert Marcuse
#43. Precisely because Galilean science is, in the formation of its concepts, the technic of a specific Lebenswelt , it does not and cannot transcend this Lebenswelt . It remains essentially within the basic experiential framework and within the universe of ends set by this reality.
Herbert Marcuse
#44. Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production.
Herbert Marcuse
#45. Technological rationality reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better domination, creating a truely totalitarian universe in which society and nature, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe.
Herbert Marcuse
#46. The people are led to find in the productive apparatus the effective agent of thought and action to which their personal thought and action can and must be surrendered. And in this transfer, the apparatus also assumes the role of a moral agent. Conscience is absolved by reification.
Herbert Marcuse
#47. The closed language does not demonstrate and explain it communicates decision, dictum, command. Where it defines, the definition becomes "separation of good from evil;" it establishes unquestionable
Herbert Marcuse
#48. The strains and stresses suffered by the individual in society are grounded in the normal functioning of that society (and of the individual!) rather than in its disturbances and diseases.
Herbert Marcuse
#49. Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all.
Herbert Marcuse
#50. The intellectual is called on the carpet ... Don't you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you.
Herbert Marcuse
#51. Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.
Herbert Marcuse
#52. [Art] can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order.
Herbert Marcuse
#53. The way in which a society organizes the life of its members ... is one "project" of realization among others. But once the project has become operative in the basic institutions and relations, it tends to become exclusive and to determine the development of the society as a whole.
Herbert Marcuse
#54. The world of immediate experience the world in which we find ourselves living must be comprehended, transformed, even subverted in order to become that which it really is.
Herbert Marcuse
#55. Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not in his mind undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity.
Herbert Marcuse
#56. Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics.
Herbert Marcuse
#57. Ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe.
Herbert Marcuse
#58. Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
Herbert Marcuse
#59. Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world.
Herbert Marcuse
#60. The Superego, in censoring the unconscious and in implanting conscience, also censors the censor.
Herbert Marcuse
#61. The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and allelse, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things: bread and circuses!
Herbert Marcuse
#62. The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the control.
Herbert Marcuse
#63. In its relation to the reality of daily life, the high culture of the past was many things opposition and adornment, outcry and resignation. But it was also the appearance of the realm of freedom: the refusal to behave.
Herbert Marcuse
#64. Glorification of the 'natural' is part of the ideology which protects an unnatural society in its struggle against liberation.
Herbert Marcuse
#65. Non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself.
Herbert Marcuse
#66. One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hyponotic definitions of dictations.
Herbert Marcuse
#67. While it [tolerance] is more or less quietly and constitutionally withdrawn from the opposition, it is made compulsory behavior with respect to established policies.
Herbert Marcuse
#68. As Hegel defines it: "Thinking is, indeed, essentially the negation of that which is before us." ... Reason is the negation of the negative ... Reason, and Reason alone, contains its own corrective.
Herbert Marcuse
#69. To live one's love and hatred, to live that which one is means defeat, resignation, and death. The crimes of society, the hell that man has made or man become unconquerable cosmic forces.
Herbert Marcuse
#70. If man has learned to see and know what really is, he will act in accordance with truth, Epistemology is in itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology.
Herbert Marcuse
#71. Reason ... contradicts the established order of men and things on behalf of existing societal forces that reveal the irrational character of this order for "rational" is a mode of thought and action which is geared to reduce ignorance, destruction, brutality, and oppression.
Herbert Marcuse
#72. Entertainment and learning are not opposites; entertainment may be the most effective mode of learning.
Herbert Marcuse
#73. The functional language is a radically anti-historical language: operational rationality has little room and little use for historical reason.
Herbert Marcuse
#74. The precarious ontological link between Logos and Eros is broken, and scientific rationality emerges as essentially neutral.
Herbert Marcuse
#75. Most people are afraid of freedom. They are conditioned to be afraid of it.
Herbert Marcuse
#76. The happy consciousness is shaky enough a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust.
Herbert Marcuse
#77. The existing liberties and the existing gratifications are tied to the requirements of repression: they themselves become instruments of repression.
Herbert Marcuse
#78. The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative.
Herbert Marcuse
#79. Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.
Herbert Marcuse
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