Herbert Marcuse Quotes

50 quotes in 898 categories

• Glorification of the 'natural' is part of the ideology which protects an unnatural society in its struggle against liberation.
• The sickness of the individual is ultimately caused by and sustained by the sickness of his civilization
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Preaching nonviolence on principle reproduces the existing institutionalized violence.
• A work of art can be called revolutionary if, by virtue of the aesthetic transformation, it represents, in the exemplary fate of individuals, the prevailing…
• 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.
• Free choice - a small selection between pre-established necessities.
• The existing liberties and the existing gratifications are tied to the requirements of repression: they themselves become instruments of repression.
• At the highest stage of capitalism, the most necessary revolution appears as the most unlikely one.
• The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative.
• Contemporary industrial society is now characterised more than ever by the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity.
• Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify…
• While it [tolerance] is more or less quietly and constitutionally withdrawn from the opposition, it is made compulsory behavior with respect to established policies.
• One can delineate the domain of philosophy however one likes, but in its search for truth, philosophy is always concerned with human existence. Authentic philosophizing…
• If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common…
• There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop.
• Behind the aesthetic form lies the repressed harmony of sensuousness and reason
• Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all.

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