Herbert Marcuse Quotes
The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.
Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.
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.
The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the control.
The Superego, in censoring the unconscious and in implanting conscience, also censors the censor.
There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop.
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.
Entertainment and learning are not opposites; entertainment may be the most effective mode of learning.
The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.
Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production.
The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.
Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.
At the highest stage of capitalism, the most necessary revolution appears as the most unlikely one.
Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.
The functional language is a radically anti-historical language: operational rationality has little room and little use for historical reason.
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.
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.
The apparatus defeats its own purpose if its purpose is to create a humane existence on the basis of a humanized nature.
The sickness of the individual is ultimately caused by and sustained by the sickness of his civilization
![Herbert Marcuse Quotes: "[Art] can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order."](https://www.quoteslyfe.com/images/collection3/quotations651/Art-can-speak-its-own-language-only-651837.jpg)
[Art] can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order.
Preaching nonviolence on principle reproduces the existing institutionalized violence.
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.
The precarious ontological link between Logos and Eros is broken, and scientific rationality emerges as essentially neutral.
Contemporary industrial society is now characterised more than ever by "the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity."
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.
The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality.
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
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.
In conditions of private property ... "life-activity" stands in the service of property instead of property standing the service of free life-activity.
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.
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.
Society ... can afford to grant more than before because its interests have become the innermost drives of its citizens.
Non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself.
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.
The avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will.
The happy consciousness is shaky enough a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust.
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.
The existing liberties and the existing gratifications are tied to the requirements of repression: they themselves become instruments of repression.
The liberating force of technology the instrumentalization of things turns into ... the instrumentalization of man.
Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics.
The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative.
This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression.