Quotes from Herbert Marcuse

The true history of mankind will be, in the strict sense, the history of free individuals, so that the interest of the whole will be woven into the individual existence of each.

the optimal goal is the replacement of false needs by true ones, the abandonment of repressive satisfaction.

Freedom of enterprise was from the beginning not altogether a blessing. As the liberty to work or to starve, it spelled toil, insecurity, and fear for the vast majority of the population. If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this kind of freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization.

La libera elezione di padroni e schiavi, non elimina né i padroni né gli schiavi" Herbert Marcuse "L'uomo a una dimensione

Remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory. Remembrance is a mode of dissociation from the given facts, a mode of "mediation" which breaks, for short moments, the omnipresent power of the given facts. Memory recalls the terror and the hope that passed. Both come to life again, but whereas in reality, the former recurs in ever new forms, the latter remains hope.

ütopya" olarak suçlanan ÅŸey art?k "yeri olmayan" ve tarihsel evren içerisinde yeri olamayacak olan ÅŸey deÄŸil, fakat daha çok, meydana gelmesi yerleÅŸik toplumlar?n güçleri taraf?ndan engellenen ÅŸeydir.

MutluluÄŸun öznel duygulardan fazlas?n? talep eden nesnel bir durum olduÄŸu düÅŸüncesi etkin bir ÅŸekilde bulan?klaÅŸt?r?lm??t?r; bu düÅŸüncenin geçerliliÄŸi "insan" türünün samimi dayan??mas?na baÄŸl?d?r, ki bu dayan??may? kar??t s?n?flara ve uluslara bölünmüÅŸ bir toplum gösteremez.

öÄŸrenci hareketi özgür bir toplumun gerçek gereksinimi ve gerçek olana??d?r.

The real universe of ordinary language is that of the struggle for existence. It is indeed an ambiguous, vague, obscure universe, and is certainly in need of clarification. Moreover, such clarification may well fulfill a therapeutic function, and if philosophy would become therapeutic, it would really come into its own.

Law and order are always and everywhere the law and order which protect the established hierarchy.

The stuff of thought is historical stuff?no matter how abstract, general, or pure it may become in philosophic or scientific theory.

The new sensibility has become, by this very token, praxis: it emerges in the struggle against violence and exploitation where this struggle is waged for essentially new ways and forms of life: negation of the entire Establishment, its morality, culture; affirmation of the right to build a society in which the abolition of poverty and toil terminates in a universe where the sensuous, the playful, the calm, and the beautiful become forms of existence and thereby the Form of the society itself.

La rationalité technologique de l'univers totalitaire est la forme la plus récente qu'a pu prendre l'idée de Raison.

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.

Non è l'ambito delle scelte aperte all'individuo il fattore decisivo nel determinate il grado della libertà umana, ma che cosa può essere scelto e che cosa è scelto dall'individuo.

To be sure, to impose Reason upon an entire society is a paradoxical and scandalous idea—

For the Enemy is permanent. He is not in the emergency situation but in the normal state of affairs. He threatens in peace as much as in war (and perhaps more than in war); he is thus being built into the system as a cohesive power.

Imagination succumbs to the general degradation of phantasy. To free it for the construction of a more beautiful and happier world remains the prerogative of children and fools.

Seamos realistas, pidamos lo imposible

The quantification of nature, which led to its explication in terms of mathematical structures, separated reality from all inherent ends and, consequently, separated the true from the good, science from ethics.

Freie« Zeit, keine »Freizeit«. Letztere gedeiht in der fortgeschrittenen Industriegesellschaft, aber ist in dem Maße unfrei, wie sie durch Geschäft und Politik verwaltet wird

Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another.

The societal division of labor obtains the dignity of an ontological condition.

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.