If man has learned to see and know what really is, he will…

The strains and stresses suffered by the individual in society are grounded in the normal functioning of that society (and of the individual!) rather…

— Herbert Marcuse

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

— Herbert Marcuse

Hypostatized into a ritual pattern, Marxian theory becomes ideology. But its content and function distinguish it from classical forms of ideology; it is not…

— Herbert Marcuse

Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the…

— Herbert Marcuse

That which is cannot be true.

— Herbert Marcuse

The closed language does not demonstrate and explain it communicates decision, dictum, command. Where it defines, the definition becomes "separation of good from evil;"…

— Herbert Marcuse

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

— Herbert Marcuse

“As Hegel defines it: "Thinking is, indeed, essentially the negation of that which is before us." ... Reason is the negation of the negative.…

— Herbert Marcuse

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

— Herbert Marcuse

If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their…

— Herbert Marcuse

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

Dialectical thought understands the critical tension between "is" and "ought" first as an ontological condition, pertaining to the structure of Being itself. However, the…

— Herbert Marcuse

Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its…

— Herbert Marcuse

“For "totalitarian" is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs…

— Herbert Marcuse

“The Orphic symbols center on the singing god who lives to defeat death and who liberates nature, so that the constrained and constraining matter…

— Herbert Marcuse