Herbert Marcuse Quotes

50 quotes in 898 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• That which is cannot be true.
• 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…
• Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.
• The functional language is a radically anti-historical language: operational rationality has little room and little use for historical reason.
• This (functional - E.W.) language controls by reducing the linguistic forms and symbols of reflection, abstraction, development, contradiction; by substituting images for concepts. It denies…
• The abbreviations (e.g. NATO, UN, USSR - E.W.) denote that and only that which is institutionalized in such a way that the transcending connotation is…
• 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…
• Where these reduced (operational - E.W.) concepts govern the analysis of the human reality, individual or social, mental or material, they arrive at a false…
• This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression.
• 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…
• The organism is thus being preconditioned for the spontaneous acceptance of what is offered. Inasmuch as the greater liberty involves a contraction rather than extension…
• 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,…
• One will only be free when one plays and one's society will become a piece of art.
• The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.
• Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
• 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.
• 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…

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