Herbert Marcuse Quotes

101 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Herbert Marcuse
The radical empiricist onslaught … provides the methodological justification for the debunking of the mind by the intellectuals—a positivism which, in its denial of the transcending elements of Reason, forms the academic counterpart of the socially required behavior.

Herbert Marcuse
It is the sphere farthest removed from the concreteness of society which may show most clearly the extent of the conquest of thought by society.

Herbert Marcuse
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.

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
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
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
The happy consciousness is shaky enough—a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust.

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
Technical progress and more comfortable living permit the systematic inclusion of libidinal components into the realm of commodity production and exchange. But no matter how controlled the mobilization of instinctual energy may be (it sometimes amounts to a scientific management of libido), no matter how much it may serve as a prop for the status quo—it is also gratifying to the managed individuals, just as racing the outboard motor, pushing the power lawn mower, and speeding the automobile are fun.

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
A whole dimension of human activity and passivity has been de-eroticized. The environment from which the individual could obtain pleasure—which he could cathect as gratifying almost as an extended zone of the body—has been rigidly reduced. Consequently, the universe of libidinous cathexis is likewise reduced. The effect is a localization and contraction of libido, the reduction of erotic to sexual experience and satisfaction.

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

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
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
Is this fight against history part of the fight against a dimension of the mind in which centrifugal faculties and forces might develop—faculties and forces that might hinder the total coordination of the individual with the society? Remembrance of the Fast may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory. Remembrance is a mode of dissociation from the given facts, a mode of mediation which breaks, for short moments, the omnipresent power of the given facts. Memory recalls the terror and the hope that passed. Both come to life again

Herbert Marcuse
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
The technical apparatus of production and distribution (with an increasing sector of automation) functions, not as the sum-total of mere instruments which can be isolated from their social and political effects, but rather as a system which determines a priori the product of the apparatus as well as the operations of servicing and extending it. In this society, the productive apparatus tends to become totalitarian to the extent to which it determines not only the socially needed occupations, skills, and attitudes, but also individual needs and aspirations. It thus obliterates the Opposition between the private and public existence, between individual and social needs.

Herbert Marcuse
The societal division of labor obtains the dignity of an ontological condition.

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
This is the pure form of servitude: to exist as an instrument.

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

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
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
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
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
The distinction between true and false consciousness, real and immediate interest still is meaningful. But this distinction itself must be validated. Men must come to see it and to find their way from false to true consciousness, from their immediate to their real interest. They can do so only if they live in need of changing their way of life, of denying the positive, of refusing. It is precisely this need which the established society manages to repress to the degree to which it is capable of delivering the goods on an increasingly large scale, and using the scientific conquest of nature for the scientific conquest of man.

Herbert Marcuse