100+ Herbert Marcuse Quotes (Critical, Dialectical And Revolutionary)

Herbert Marcuse was a German philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist. He was a member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory and is best known for his 1965 work "One-Dimensional Man". Marcuse's work was influential in the development of critical theory and post-structuralism and his ideas have been influential in the development of the New Left and the student movements of the 1960s.

Top 10 Herbert Marcuse Quotes

1. The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the control.
2. There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop.
3. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value counts. On it centers the rationality of the status quo, and all alien rationality is bent to It.
4. Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
5. The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.
6. Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all.
7. The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.
8. The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and allelse, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things: bread and circuses!
9. Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.
10. Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.

Herbert Marcuse Short Quotes

• The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality.
• One will only be free when one plays and one's society will become a piece of art.
• The societal division of labor obtains the dignity of an ontological condition.
• Most people are afraid of freedom. They are conditioned to be afraid of it.
• The Superego, in censoring the unconscious and in implanting conscience, also censors the censor.
• The happy consciousness is shaky enough a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust.
• Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics.
• At the highest stage of capitalism, the most necessary revolution appears as the most unlikely one.
• This is the pure form of servitude: to exist as an instrument.
• Behind the aesthetic form lies the repressed harmony of sensuousness and reason

Herbert Marcuse Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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 denominator -- the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts. — Herbert Marcuse

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, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe. — Herbert Marcuse

The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies. — Herbert Marcuse

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

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. — 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

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 us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you. — 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 own morality but to those of another. — Herbert Marcuse

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

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 unfreedom and the rebelling forces, thus breaking through the mystified (and petrified) social reality, and opening the horizon of change (liberation). — Herbert Marcuse

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

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 and what is chosen by the individual. — Herbert Marcuse

To live one's love and hatred, to live that which one is means defeat, resignation, and death. The crimes of society, the hell that man has made or man become unconquerable cosmic forces. — Herbert Marcuse

By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. 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 by vested interests. — Herbert Marcuse

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

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 against the expression of protest and refusal. — Herbert Marcuse

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

The ontological concept of truth is in the centre of a logic which may serve as a model of pre- technological rationality. It is the rationality of a two-dimensional universe of discourse which, contrasts with the of thought and behavior that develop in the execution of the technological project. — Herbert Marcuse

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 freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear – that is, if they sustain alienation. And the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls. — Herbert Marcuse

However, if "free choice" means more than a small selection between pre-established necessities, and if the inclinations and impulses used in work are other than those preshaped by a repressive reality principle, then satisfaction in daily work is only a rare privilege. — Herbert Marcuse

In conditions of private property ... "life-activity" stands in the service of property instead of property standing the service of free life-activity. — Herbert Marcuse

This organization of functional discourse is of vital importance; it serves as a vehicle of coordination and subordination. The unified, functional language is an irreconcilably anti-critical and anti-dialectical language. In it, operational and behavioral rationality absorbs the transcendent, negative, oppositional elements of Reason. — 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;" it establishes unquestionable — Herbert Marcuse

Our mass media have little difficulty in selling particular interests as those of all sensible men. The political needs of society become individual needs and aspirations, their satisfaction promotes business and the commonweal, and the whole appeals to be the very embodiment of Reason. — Herbert Marcuse

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

Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not - in his mind - undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity. — Herbert Marcuse

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

The capabilities (intellectual and material) of contemporary society are immeasurably greater than ever before - which means that the scope of society's domination over the individual is immeasurably greater than ever before. Our society distinguishes itself by conquering the centrifugal social forces with Technology rather than Terror, on the dual basis of an overwhelming efficiency and an increasing standard of living. — Herbert Marcuse

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

All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude, and the emergence of this consciousness is always hampered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions which, to a great extent, have become the individual's own. — Herbert Marcuse

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

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

The philosopher ... subjects experience to his critical judgment, and this contains a value judgment namely, that freedom from toil is preferable to toil, and an intelligent life is preferable to a stupid life. It so happened that philosophy was born with these values. Scientific thought had to break this union of value judgment and analysis, for it became increasingly clear that the philosophic values did not guide the organisation of society. — Herbert Marcuse

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

Precisely because Galilean science is, in the formation of its concepts, the technic of a specific Lebenswelt , it does not and cannot transcend this Lebenswelt . It remains essentially within the basic experiential framework and within the universe of ends set by this reality. — Herbert Marcuse

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

The slaves of developed industrial civilization are sublimated slaves. — Herbert Marcuse

While it [tolerance] is more or less quietly and constitutionally withdrawn from the opposition, it is made compulsory behavior with respect to established policies. — 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

Such abstraction which refuses to accept the given universe of facts as the final context of validation, such "transcending" analysis of the facts in the light of their arrested and denied possibilities, pertains to the very structure of social theory. — Herbert Marcuse

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

The strains and stresses suffered by the individual in society are grounded in the normal functioning of that society (and of the individual!) rather than in its disturbances and diseases. — Herbert Marcuse

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

When the whole is at stake, there is no crime except that of rejecting the whole, or not defending it. ... Those who identify themselves with the whole, who are installed as the leaders and defenders of the whole can make mistakes, but they cannot do wrong - they are not guilty. They may become guilty again when this identification no longer holds, when they are gone. — 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

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

The way in which a society organizes the life of its members ... is one "project" of realization among others. But once the project has become operative in the basic institutions and relations, it tends to become exclusive and to determine the development of the society as a whole. — Herbert Marcuse

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

This mutual dependencies no longer the dialectical relationship between master and servant, which has been broken in the struggle for mutual recognition, but rather a vicious circle which encloses both the master and the servant. Do the technicians rule, or is their rule that of the others, who rely on the technicians as their planners and executors? — Herbert Marcuse

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

Freed from the sublimated form which was the very token of its irreconcilable dreams - a form which is the style, the language in which the story is told - sexuality turns into a vehicle for the bestsellers of oppression. ... This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and of exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression. Sexuality is no exception. — Herbert Marcuse

Bourgeois political economy ... never gets to see man who is its real subject. It disregards the essence of man and his history and is thus in the profoundest sense not a 'science of people' but of non-people and of an inhuman world of objects and commodities. — Herbert Marcuse

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

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 and development of instinctual needs, it works for rather than against the status quo of general repression - one might speak of "institutionalized desublimation". The latter appears to be a vital factor in the making of the authoritarian personality of our time. — 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 false consciousness, but a rather consciousness of falsehood, a falsehood which is corrected in the context of the higher truth represented by the objective historical interest. — Herbert Marcuse

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 cut off. The meaning is fixed, doctored, loaded. Once it has become an official vocable, constantly repeated in general usage, "sanctioned" by the intellectuals, it has lost all cognitive value and serves merely for recognition of an unquestionable fact. — Herbert Marcuse

The range of socially permissible and desirable satisfaction is greatly enlarged, but through this satisfaction, the Pleasure Principle is reduced deprived of the claims which are irreconcilable with the established society. Pleasure, thus adjusted, generates submission. — Herbert Marcuse

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

In the form of the oeuvre, the actual circumstances are placed in another dimension where the given reality shows itself as that which it is. Thus it tells the truth about itself; its language ceases to be that of deception, ignorance, and submission. Fiction calls the facts by their name and their reign collapses; fiction subverts everyday experience and shows it to be mutilated and false. — Herbert Marcuse

Ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe. — Herbert Marcuse

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

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 one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need. — Herbert Marcuse

That which is cannot be true. — Herbert Marcuse

Inasmuch as art preserves, with the promise of happiness, the memory of the goal that failed, it can enter, as a 'regulative idea,' the desperate struggle for changing the world. Against all fetishism of the productive forces, against the continued enslavement of individuals by the objective conditions (which remain those of domination), art represents the ultimate goal of all revolutions: the freedom and happiness of the individual. — Herbert Marcuse

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

The functional language is a radically anti-historical language: operational rationality has little room and little use for historical reason. — 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 recognition of this state of Being its theory intends from the beginning a concrete practice. Seen in the light of a truth which appears in them falsified or denied, the given facts themselves appear false and negative. — Herbert Marcuse

If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population. — Herbert Marcuse

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 refuses to remain at the stage of knowledge […]. Care for human existence and its truth makes philosophy a 'practical science' in the deepest sense, and it also leads philosophy—and this is the crucial point—into the concrete distress of human existence. — Herbert Marcuse

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 indifference. — Herbert Marcuse

Thought and speech are of a thinking and speaking subject, and if the life of the latter depends on the performance of a superimposed function, it depends on fulfilling the requirements of this function thus it depends on those who control these requirements. — Herbert Marcuse

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

At the classical origins of philosophic thought, the transcending concepts remained committed to the prevailing separation between intellectual and manual labor to the established society of enslavement. ... Those who bore the brunt of the untrue reality and who, therefore, seemed to be most in need of attaining its subversion were not the concern of philosophy. It abstracted from them and continued to abstract from them. — 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 world. — Herbert Marcuse

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

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

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 or absorbs the transcendent vocabulary; it does not search for but establishes and imposes truth and falsehood. — Herbert Marcuse

The people are led to find in the productive apparatus the effective agent of thought and action to which their personal thought and action can and must be surrendered. And in this transfer, the apparatus also assumes the role of a moral agent. Conscience is absolved by reification. — Herbert Marcuse

Preaching nonviolence on principle reproduces the existing institutionalized violence. — Herbert Marcuse

Life Lessons by Herbert Marcuse

1. Herbert Marcuse believed that individuals should strive to make the world a better place by challenging oppressive social norms. He argued that individuals should strive to be critical and to question the status quo in order to bring about positive change.
2. Marcuse also argued that individuals should strive to be aware of their own personal biases and to be conscious of how their actions can affect the world around them. He believed that individuals should strive to be self-reflective and to think critically about their own beliefs and values.
3. Finally, Marcuse believed that individuals should strive to be tolerant of those with different beliefs and opinions, and to be open to new ideas and perspectives. He argued that this kind of open-mindedness is essential for creating a more equitable and just society