Herbert Marcuse Short Quotes

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

Herbert Marcuse
Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.

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

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

Herbert Marcuse
Behind the aesthetic form lies the repressed harmony of sensuousness and reason

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

Herbert Marcuse
Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics.

Herbert Marcuse
The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality.

Herbert Marcuse
Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.

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

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

Herbert Marcuse
The Superego, in censoring the unconscious and in implanting conscience, also censors the censor.

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

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

Herbert Marcuse
The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.

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

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

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

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

Herbert Marcuse
Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.

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

Herbert Marcuse
There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop.

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

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 spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the control.

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