Herbert Marcuse quotes

Herbert Marcuse was a German-American philosopher and sociologist associated with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. His works explored critiques of capitalist society, technology, and culture, influencing social movements in the 1960s. He became an iconic figure for radical intellectuals and activists seeking social change. Here are 159 of his quotes:

The apparatus defeats its own purpose if its purpose is to create a humane existence on the basis of a humanized nature. (Herbert Marcuse)
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. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
In its relation to the reality of daily life, the high culture of the past was many things-opposition and adornment, outcry and resignation. But it was also the appearance of the realm of freedom: the refusal to behave. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Reason ... contradicts the established order of men and things on behalf of existing societal forces that reveal the irrational character of this order - for "rational” is a mode of thought and action which is geared to reduce ignorance, destruction, brutality, and oppression. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
The capabilities (intellectual and material) of contemporary society are immeasurably greater than ever before-which means that the scope of society's domination over the individual is immeasurably greater than ever before. Our society distinguishes itself by conquering the centrifugal social forces with Technology rather than Terror, on the dual basis of an overwhelming efficiency and an increasing standard of living. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the control. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Entertainment and learning are not opposites; entertainment may be the most effective mode of learning. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production. (Herbert Marcuse)
[Art] can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
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. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
The precarious ontological link between Logos and Eros is broken, and scientific rationality emerges as essentially neutral. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
When the whole is at stake, there is no crime except that of rejecting the whole, or not defending it. ... Those who identify themselves with the whole, who are installed as the leaders and defenders of the whole can make mistakes, but they cannot do wrong - they are not guilty. They may become guilty again when this identification no longer holds, when they are gone. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
At the classical origins of philosophic thought, the transcending concepts remained committed to the prevailing separation between intellectual and manual labor to the established society of enslavement. ... Those who bore the brunt of the untrue reality and who, therefore, seemed to be most in need of attaining its subversion were not the concern of philosophy. It abstracted from them and continued to abstract from them. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
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. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
The present stage redefines the possibilities of man and nature in accordance with the new means available for their realization. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
The ontological concept of truth is in the centre of a logic which may serve as a model of pre- technological rationality. It is the rationality of a two-dimensional universe of discourse which, contrasts with the of thought and behavior that develop in the execution of the technological project. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
This mutual dependencies no longer the dialectical relationship between master and servant, which has been broken in the struggle for mutual recognition, but rather a vicious circle which encloses both the master and the servant. Do the technicians rule, or is their rule that of the others, who rely on the technicians as their planners and executors? (Herbert Marcuse)
The slaves of developed industrial civilization are sublimated slaves. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
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. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
The judgment that human life is worth living, or rather can and ought to be made worth living, ... underlies all intellectual effort; it is the a priori of social theory, and its rejection (which is perfectly logical) rejects theory itself. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
To the degree to which they correspond to the given reality, thought and behavior express a false consciousness, responding to and contributing to the preservation of a false order of facts. And this false consciousness has become embodied in the prevailing technical apparatus which in turn reproduces it. View quote
Herbert Marcuse