Quotes from Herbert Marcuse

That which is cannot be true.

The present stage redefines the possibilities of man and nature in accordance with the new means available for their realization.

The avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will.

The apparatus defeats its own purpose if its purpose is to create a humane existence on the basis of a humanized nature.

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

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

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

While it [tolerance] is more or less quietly and constitutionally withdrawn from the opposition, it is made compulsory behavior with respect to established policies.

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

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

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

This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression.

Society ... can afford to grant more than before because its interests have become the innermost drives of its citizens.

In conditions of private property ... "life-activity" stands in the service of property instead of property standing the service of free life-activity.

The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual.

The liberating force of technology the instrumentalization of things turns into ... the instrumentalization of man.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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