Herbert Marcuse famous quotes

04-17-2025

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

#Doe #Needs #Spontaneous
Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.
-- Herbert Marcuse

#Powerful #Liberty #Made
Entertainment and learning are not opposites; entertainment may be the most effective mode of learning.
-- Herbert Marcuse

#Opposites #May #Entertainment
The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.
-- Herbert Marcuse

#Art #Real #Lying
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

#Self #Information #Definitions
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

#Past #Reality #Culture
The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of oneâ€™s own destruction, has become a â€œbiologicalâ€ need.
-- Herbert Marcuse

#Men #Ties #People
Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.
-- Herbert Marcuse

#Mean #Tolerance #Movement
Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production.
-- Herbert Marcuse

#Girlfriend #Problem #Funny Girlfriend
There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop.
-- Herbert Marcuse

#Space #Silence #Solitude
Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle...The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.
-- Herbert Marcuse

#Art #Reality #Law
Freedom of enterprise was from the beginning not altogether a blessing. As the liberty to work or to starve, it spelled toil, insecurity, and fear for the vast majority of the population. If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization.
-- Herbert Marcuse

#Business #Blessing #Civilization
Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
-- Herbert Marcuse

#Historical #Doe #Election
At the highest stage of capitalism, the most necessary revolution appears as the most unlikely one.
-- Herbert Marcuse

#Revolution #Unlikely #Stage
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

#Determination #Gun #Race
In [Aristotle's] formal logic, thought is organized in a manner very different from that of the Platonic dialogue. In this formal logic, thought is indifferent toward its objects. Whether they are mental or physical, whether they pertain to society or to nature, they become subject to the same general laws of organization, calculation, and conclusion but they do so as fungible signs or symbols, in abstraction from their particular "substance." This general quality (quantitative quality) is the precondition of law and order in logic as well as in society the price of universal control.
-- Herbert Marcuse

#Order #Law #Organization
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

#Order #World
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

#Ignorance #Character #Men
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

#Real #Needs #Contemporary
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

#Rejection #Effort #Intellectual
To the degree to which they correspond to the given reality, thought and behavior express a false consciousness, responding to and contributing to the preservation of a false order of facts. And this false consciousness has become embodied in the prevailing technical apparatus which in turn reproduces it.
-- Herbert Marcuse

#Reality #Order #Degrees
The Superego, in censoring the unconscious and in implanting conscience, also censors the censor.
-- Herbert Marcuse

#Unconscious #Superego #Conscience
the society which projects and undertakes the technological transformation of nature alters the base of domination by gradually replacing personal dependence (of the slave on the master, the serf on the lord of the manor, the lord on the donor of the fief, etc.) with dependence on the "objective order of things" (on economic laws, the market etc.).
-- Herbert Marcuse

#Order #Law #Etc
Coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.
-- Herbert Marcuse

#Dimensions #Force #Estrangement
Free choice - a small selection between pre-established necessities.
-- Herbert Marcuse

#Choices

You may also like:

Antonio Gramsci
Writer
David Gemmell
Author
Erich Fromm
Psychologist
Friedrich Nietzsche
Philologist
Georg Simmel
Philosopher
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Philosopher
Gyorgy Lukacs
Philosopher
Herbert Spencer
Philosopher
Jacques Derrida
Philosopher
Jean-Paul Sartre
Philosopher
Jurgen Habermas
Philosopher
Karl Marx
Philosopher
Louis Althusser
Philosopher
Martin Heidegger
Philosopher
Max Horkheimer
Philosopher
Michel Foucault
Philosopher
Sigmund Freud
Neurologist
Theodor Adorno
Sociologist
Walter Benjamin
Literary critic
Wilhelm Reich
Psychoanalyst