Herbert Marcuse Quotes

The happy consciousness is shaky enough a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust.

Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all.

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.

This is the pure form of servitude: to exist as an instrument.

That which is cannot be true.

Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.

The revolution is for the sake of life, not death.

Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.

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.

Preaching nonviolence on principle reproduces the existing institutionalized violence.

At the highest stage of capitalism, the most necessary revolution appears as the most unlikely one.

The existing liberties and the existing gratifications are tied to the requirements of repression: they themselves become instruments of repression.

[Art] can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order.

Behind the aesthetic form lies the repressed harmony of sensuousness and reason

The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative.

The precarious ontological link between Logos and Eros is broken, and scientific rationality emerges as essentially neutral.

The present stage redefines the possibilities of man and nature in accordance with the new means available for their realization.

Glorification of the 'natural' is part of the ideology which protects an unnatural society in its struggle against liberation.

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.

Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.

The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.

The functional language is a radically anti-historical language: operational rationality has little room and little use for historical reason.

There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop.

The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the control.

The Superego, in censoring the unconscious and in implanting conscience, also censors the censor.

The liberating force of technology the instrumentalization of things turns into ... the instrumentalization of man.

Contemporary industrial society is now characterised more than ever by the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity.

The slaves of developed industrial civilization are sublimated slaves.

The sickness of the individual is ultimately caused by and sustained by the sickness of his civilization

The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.

Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production.

Society ... can afford to grant more than before because its interests have become the innermost drives of its citizens.

Most people are afraid of freedom. They are conditioned to be afraid of it.

Entertainment and learning are not opposites; entertainment may be the most effective mode of learning.

Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics.

The societal division of labor obtains the dignity of an ontological condition.

The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.

Non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself.

The avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will.

The apparatus defeats its own purpose if its purpose is to create a humane existence on the basis of a humanized nature.