Explore Quotes by Herbert Marcuse

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 so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.

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

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

One can delineate the domain of philosophy however one likes, but in its search for truth, philosophy is always concerned with human existence. Authentic philosophizing refuses to remain at the stage of knowledge […]. Care for human existence and its truth makes philosophy a 'practical science' in the deepest sense, and it also leads philosophy—and this is the crucial point—into the concrete distress of human existence.

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.

While it [tolerance] is more or less quietly and constitutionally withdrawn from the opposition, it is made compulsory behavior with respect to established policies.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Preaching nonviolence on principle reproduces the existing institutionalized violence.

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 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.

A work of art can be called revolutionary if, by virtue of the aesthetic transformation, it represents, in the exemplary fate of individuals, the prevailing unfreedom and the rebelling forces, thus breaking through the mystified (and petrified) social reality, and opening the horizon of change (liberation).

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.

One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hyponotic definitions of dictations.

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

Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production.