Herbert Marcuse

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

Contemporary industrial society is now characterised more than ever by "the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity."

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.

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

While it [tolerance] is more or less quietly and constitutionally withdrawn from the opposition, it is made compulsory behavior with respect to established policies.