Quotes from Herbert Marcuse

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

Contemporary industrial society is now characterised more than ever by "the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity."

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

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

Political freedom would mean liberation of the individuals from politics over which they have no effective control. Similarly

a political practice of methodical disengagement from and refusal of the Establishment, aiming at a radical transvaluation of values. Such a practice involves a break with the familiar, the routine ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding things so that the organism may become receptive to the potential forms of a nonaggressive, nonexploitative world.

For Marcuse, the distinguishing features of a human being are free and creative subjectivity. If in one's economic and social life one is administered by a technical labor apparatus and conforms to dominant social norms, one is losing one's potentialities of self-determination and individuality. Alienated from the powers of being-a-self, one-dimensional man thus becomes an object of administration and conformity.

Le persone si riconoscono nelle loro merci; trovano la loro anima nella loro automobile, nel giradischi ad alta fedeltà, nella casa a due piani, nell'attrezzatura della cucina. Lo stesso meccanismo che lega l'individuo alla sua società è mutato, e il controllo sociale è radicato nei nuovi bisogni che esso ha prodotto.

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.

rational is a mode of thought and action which is geared to reduce ignorance, destruction, brutality, and oppression

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.

Whether ritualized or not, art contains the rationality of negation. In its advanced positions, it is the Great Refusal—the protest against that which is.

The slaves of developed industrial Civilization are sublimated slaves, but they are slaves, for slavery is determined "neither by obedience nor by hardness of labour but by the status of being mere instrument, and the reduction of man to the state of a thing.

The revolution is for the sake of life, not death.

Solitude, the very condition which sustained the individual against and beyond his society, has become technically impossible.

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.

This language, which constantly imposes images, militates against the development and expression of concepts.

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.

For "totalitarian" is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a nonterroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests. It

Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. 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 world is an estranged and untrue world so long as man does not destroy its dead objectivity and recognize himself and his own life 'behind' the fixed form of things and laws. When he finally wins this self-consciousness, he is on his way not only to the truth of himself, but also of his world. And with the recognition goes the doing. He will try to put this truth into action, and make the world what it essentially is, namely, the fulfillment of man's self-consciousness.

Timelessness is the ideal of pleasure.

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

But with all its truth, the argument cannot answer the time-honored question: who educates the educators, and where is the proof that they are in possession of "the good?