Herbert Marcuse Quotes

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.

The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.

Most people are afraid of freedom. They are conditioned to be afraid of it.

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.

Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.

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

The means of communication, the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers to the producers and, through the latter to the whole social system. The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood...Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior.

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

Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all.

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

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

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

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.

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

One will only be free when one plays and one's society will become a piece of art.

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

Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle...The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.

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

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

Preaching nonviolence on principle reproduces the existing institutionalized violence.

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.

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

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.

[Art] can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order.