Herbert Marcuse quotes - page 2

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:

This organization of functional discourse is of vital importance; it serves as a vehicle of coordination and subordination. The unified, functional language is an irreconcilably anti-critical and anti-dialectical language. In it, operational and behavioral rationality absorbs the transcendent, negative, oppositional elements of Reason. (Herbert Marcuse)
The range of socially permissible and desirable satisfaction is greatly enlarged, but through this satisfaction, the Pleasure Principle is reduced deprived of the claims which are irreconcilable with the established society. Pleasure, thus adjusted, generates submission. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Thought and speech are of a thinking and speaking subject, and if the life of the latter depends on the performance of a superimposed function, it depends on fulfilling the requirements of this function thus it depends on those who control these requirements. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
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. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
The liberating force of technology the instrumentalization of things turns into ... the instrumentalization of man. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
The avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
The philosopher ... subjects experience to his critical judgment, and this contains a value judgment namely, that freedom from toil is preferable to toil, and an intelligent life is preferable to a stupid life. It so happened that philosophy was born with these values. Scientific thought had to break this union of value judgment and analysis, for it became increasingly clear that the philosophic values did not guide the organisation of society. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
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. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
In the form of the oeuvre, the actual circumstances are placed in another dimension where the given reality shows itself as that which it is. Thus it tells the truth about itself; its language ceases to be that of deception, ignorance, and submission. Fiction calls the facts by their name and their reign collapses; fiction subverts everyday experience and shows it to be mutilated and false. (Herbert Marcuse)
This is the pure form of servitude: to exist as an instrument. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
The way in which a society organizes the life of its members ... is one "project” of realization among others. But once the project has become operative in the basic institutions and relations, it tends to become exclusive and to determine the development of the society as a whole. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Such abstraction which refuses to accept the given universe of facts as the final context of validation, such "transcending” analysis of the facts in the light of their arrested and denied possibilities, pertains to the very structure of social theory. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
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. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Freed from the sublimated form which was the very token of its irreconcilable dreams-a form which is the style, the language in which the story is told-sexuality turns into a vehicle for the bestsellers of oppression. ... This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and of exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression. Sexuality is no exception. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
In conditions of private property ... "life-activity” stands in the service of property instead of property standing the service of free life-activity. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Bourgeois political economy ... never gets to see man who is its real subject. It disregards the essence of man and his history and is thus in the profoundest sense not a ‘science of people' but of non-people and of an inhuman world of objects and commodities. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Dialectical logic undoes the abstractions of formal logic and of transcendental philosophy, but it also denies the concreteness of immediate experience. To the extent to which this experience comes to rest with the things as they appear and happen to be, it is a limited and even false experience. It attains its truth if it has freed itself from the deceptive objectivity which conceals the factors behind the facts - that is, if it understands its world as a historical universe, in which the established facts are the work of the historical practice of man. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude, and the emergence of this consciousness is always hampered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions which, to a great extent, have become the individual's own. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
The soul contains few secrets and longings which cannot be sensibly discussed, analyzed, and polled. Solitude, the very condition which sustained the individual against and beyond his society, has become technically impossible. Logical and linguistic analysis demonstrate that the old metaphysical problems are illusory problems; the quest for the "meaning” of things can be reformulated as the quest for the meaning of words, and the established universe of discourse and behavior can provide perfectly adequate criteria for the answer. (Herbert Marcuse)
Technical progress and more comfortable living permit the systematic inclusion of libidinal components into the realm of commodity production and exchange. But no matter how controlled the mobilization of instinctual energy may be (it sometimes amounts to a scientific management of libido), no matter how much it may serve as a prop for the status quo - it is also gratifying to the managed individuals, just as racing the outboard motor, pushing the power lawn mower, and speeding the automobile are fun. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Precisely because Galilean science is, in the formation of its concepts, the technic of a specific Lebenswelt, it does not and cannot transcend this Lebenswelt . It remains essentially within the basic experiential framework and within the universe of ends set by this reality. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but 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. View quote
Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse - Image
Photo: Copyright holder: Marcuse family, represented by Harold Marcuse, CC BY-SA 3.0
Occupation: German Philosopher
Born: July 19, 1898
Died: July 29, 1979
Quotes count: 159
Wikipedia: Herbert Marcuse

Related authors

Theodor Adorno  161 
German Philosopher
Max Horkheimer - thumbnail
Max Horkheimer  61 
German Philosopher
Jürgen Habermas - thumbnail
Jürgen Habermas  52 
German Sociologist
Karl Marx - thumbnail
Karl Marx  368 
German Philosopher
Erich Fromm - thumbnail
Erich Fromm  185 
German Sociologist
Walter Benjamin - thumbnail
Walter Benjamin  106 
German Critic
Sigmund Freud - thumbnail
Sigmund Freud  233 
Austrian Neurologist
Martin Heidegger  90 
German Philosopher
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - thumbnail
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel  126 
German Philosopher
György Lukács  13 
Hungarian Philosopher