Herbert Marcuse Quotes - Page 2

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• The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but 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

  Plato, Mass Culture, People

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.67, Routledge

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• At the highest stage of capitalism, the most necessary revolution appears as the most unlikely one.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Revolution, Unlikely, Stage

  Herbert Marcuse (2010). “Counterrevolution and Revolt”, p.7, Beacon Press

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• The slaves of developed industrial civilization are sublimated slaves.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Civilization, Slave

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.36, Routledge

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• 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

  Herbert Marcuse (1971). “An Essay on Liberation”, p.12, Beacon Press

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• 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

  Daughter, Equality, Class

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.10, Routledge

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• 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

  Character, Creating, Political

  Herbert Marcuse (2012). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.18, Beacon Press

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• 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

  Political, Needs, Way

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.5, Routledge

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

  Herbert Marcuse

  Art, Order, Long

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.65, Routledge

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• 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

  Culture, Pluralism, Indifference

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.64, Routledge

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• That which is cannot be true.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Being True

  Herbert Marcuse (2012). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.123, Beacon Press

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• 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

  Art, Philosophy, Communication

  Herbert Marcuse (2012). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.57, Beacon Press

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• 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

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.4, Routledge

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• The soul contains few secrets and longings which cannot be sensibly discussed, analyzed, and polled. Solitude, the very condition which sustained the individual against and beyond his society, has become technically impossible. Logical and linguistic analysis demonstrate that the old metaphysical problems are illusory problems; the quest for the "meaning" of things can be reformulated as the quest for the meaning of words, and the established universe of discourse and behavior can provide perfectly adequate criteria for the answer.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Soul, Solitude, Secret

  Herbert Marcuse (2012). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.71, Beacon Press

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• The functional language is a radically anti-historical language: operational rationality has little room and little use for historical reason.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Historical, Culture, Use

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.101, Routledge

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• 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. Pbscene is not the picture of a naked woman who exposes her pubic hair but that of a fully clad general who exposes his medals rewarded in a war of aggression; obscene is not the ritual of the Hippies but the declaration of a high dignitary of the Church that war is necessary for peace.

  Herbert Marcuse

  War, Hippie, Hair

  Herbert Marcuse (1971). “An Essay on Liberation”, p.8, Beacon Press

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

  Herbert Marcuse

  Purpose, Defeat, Existence

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.149, Routledge

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• 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

  Memories, Giving, Childhood

  Herbert Marcuse (2015). “Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud”, p.19, Beacon Press

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• 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

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.75, Routledge

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

  Herbert Marcuse

  Struggle, Gay, Natural

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.242, Routledge

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• 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

  Thinking, Mind, Doe

  "One-Dimensional Man" by Herbert Marcuse, (p. 134), 1964.

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• 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

  Cutting, Culture, Abbreviations

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• 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

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.147, Routledge

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• Institutionalized desublimation thus appears to be an aspect of the "conquest of transcendence" achieved by the one-dimensional society. Just as this society tends to reduce, and even absorb opposition (the qualitative difference!) in the realm of politics and higher culture, so it does in the instinctual sphere. The result is the atrophy of the mental organs for grasping the contradictions and the alternatives and, in the one remaining dimension of technological rationality, the Happy Consciousness comes to prevail.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Differences, Alternatives, Dimensions

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.82, Routledge

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• 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

  "One-Dimensional Man" by Herbert Marcuse, (p. 9), 1964.

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• 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

  Communication, Expression, Opposites

  Herbert Marcuse (2012). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.90, Beacon Press

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