Herbert Marcuse > Quotes

“Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.”
― Herbert Marcuse

“The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.”
― Herbert Marcuse

“The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.”
― Herbert Marcuse

“If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production.”
― Herbert Marcuse

“The means of communication, the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers to the producers and, through the latter to the whole social system. The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood...Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior.”
― Herbert Marcuse

“One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hyponotic definitions of dictations.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.”
― 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.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

“The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies.”
― Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud

“Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle...The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.”
― Herbert Marcuse

“الحرية الإنسانية لا تقاس تبعاً للإختيار المتاح للفرد، وإنما العامل الحاسم والوحيد في تحديدها هو ما يستطيع الفرد اختياره وما يختاره”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“Remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“Under conditions of a truly human existence, the difference between succumbing to disease at the age of ten, thirty, fifty, or seventy, and dying a "natural" death after a fulfilled life, may well be a difference worth fighting for with all instinctual energy. Not those who die, but those who die before they must and want to die, those who die in agony and pain, are the great indictment against civilization. They also testify to the unredeemable guilt of mankind. Their death arouses the painful awareness that it was unnecessary, that it could be otherwise. It takes all the institutions and values of a repressive order to pacify the bad conscience of this guilt. Once again, the deep connection between the death instinct and the sense of guilt becomes apparent. The silent "professional agreement" with the fact of death and disease is perhaps one of the most widespread expressions of the death instinct -- or, rather, of its social usefulness. In a repressive civilization, death itself becomes an instrument of repression. Whether death is feared as constant threat, or glorified as supreme sacrifice, or accepted as fate, the education for consent to death introduces an element of surrender into life from the beginning -- surrender and submission. It stifles "utopian" efforts. The powers that be have a deep affinity to death; death is a token of unfreedom, of defeat. Theology and philosophy today compete with each other in celebrating death as an existential category: perverting a biological fact into an ontological essence, they bestow transcendental blessing on the guilt of mankind which they help to perpetuate -- they betray the promise of utopia.”
― Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud

“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.”
― 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.”
― Herbert Marcuse

“The strains and stresses suffered by the individual in society are grounded in the normal functioning of that society (and of the individual!) rather than in its disturbances and diseases.”
― Herbert Marcuse

“We may distinguish both true and false needs. “False” are those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. Their satisfaction might be most gratifying to the individual, but this happiness is not a condition which has to be maintained and protected if it serves to arrest the development of the ability (his own and others) to recognize the disease of the whole and grasp the chances of curing the disease. The result then is euphoria in unhappiness. Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“The danger of abusing the discovery of the truth value of imagination for retrogressive tendencies is exemplified by the work of Carl Jung. More empathically than Freud, he has insisted on the cognitive force of imagination. According to Jung, phantasy is ‘undistinguishably’ united with all other mental functions, it appears ‘now as primeval, now as the ultimate and most audacious synthesis of all capabilities.’ Phantasy is above all the ‘creative activity out of which flow the answers to all answerable questions’; it is ‘the mother of all possibilities, in which all mental opposites as well as the conflict between internal and external world are united.’ Phantasy has always built the bridge between the irreconcilable demands of object and subject, extroversion and introversion. The simultaneously retrospective and expectant character of imagination is thus clearly stated: it looks not only back to an aboriginal golden past, but also forward to still unrealized but realizable possibilities.”
― Herbert Marcuse

“The Orphic symbols center on the singing god who lives to defeat death and who liberates nature, so that the constrained and constraining matter releases the beautiful and playful forms of animate and inanimate things. No longer striving and no longer desiring ‘for something still to be attained,’ they are free from fear and fetter – and thus free per se. The contemplation of Narcissus repels all other activity in the erotic surrender to beauty, inseparably uniting his own existence with nature.”
― Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud

“Inasmuch as art preserves, with the promise of happiness, the memory of the goal that failed, it can enter, as a 'regulative idea,' the desperate struggle for changing the world. Against all fetishism of the productive forces, against the continued enslavement of individuals by the objective conditions (which remain those of domination), art represents the ultimate goal of all revolutions: the freedom and happiness of the individual.”
― Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics

“Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and allelse, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things: bread and circuses!”
― herbert marcuse

“Every sound reason is on the side of law and order in their insistence that the eternity of joy be reserved for the hereafter, and in their endeavor to subordinate the struggle against death and disease to the never-ceasing requirements of national and international security.”
― Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud

“The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation—liberation also from that which is tolerable and rewarding and comfortable—while it sustains and absolves the destructive power and repressive function of the affluent society. Here, the social controls exact the overwhelming need for the production and consumption of waste; the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stupefication; the need for maintaining such deceptive liberties as free competition at administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“As Hegel defines it: "Thinking is, indeed, essentially the negation of that which is before us." ... Reason is the negation of the negative. ... Reason, and Reason alone, contains its own corrective.”
― Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory

“The high standard of living in the domain of the great corporations is restrictive in a concrete sociological sense: the goods and services that the individuals buy control their needs and petrify their faculties. In exchange for the commodities that enrich their life, the individuals sell not only their labor but also their free time. The better living is offset by the all-pervasive control over living. People dwell in apartment concentrations- and have private automobiles with which they can no longer escape into a different world. They have huge refrigerators filled with frozen foods. They have dozens of newspapers and magazines that espouse the same ideals. They have innumerable choices, innumerable gadgets which are all of the same sort and keep them occupied and divert their attention from the real issue- which is the
awareness that they could both work less and determine their own needs and satisfactions.”
― Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud

“Technology serves to institute new, more effective, and more pleasant forms of social control and social cohesion. The totalitarian tendency of these controls seems to assert itself in still another sense—by spreading to the less developed and even to the pre-industrial areas of the world, and by creating similarities in the development of capitalism and communism.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“فلم يعد من مهامها "الثورة" أن تقوم بالتعميق الجذري للتيارات الموجودة فعلا في المجتمع القائم و أن تقوم بتكملة مسار هذه التيارات و لكنها أصبحت نوعا من الايقاظ و الشحذ و التعبئة لتلك الطاقات التي تبدو سلبية بشكل أو بأخر نتيجة لما تتعرض له من الامتصاص و القهر الذي تمارسه عليها تلك القوي المشكلة للتجربة الانسانية”
― Herbert Marcuse

“Na construção da personalidade, o instinto de destruição manifesta-se com a maior nitidez na formação do superego . Certo, por seu papel defensivo contra os impulsos irrealistas do id, por sua função na conquista duradoura do complexo de Édipo, o superego consolida e protege a unidade do ego, garante o seu desenvolvimento sob o princípio de realidade e, assim, atua a serviço de Eros. Contudo, o superego atinge esses objetivos dirigindo o ego contra o seu id, desviando parte dos instintos de destruição contra uma parte da personalidade destruindo, fragmentando a unidade da personalidade como um todo; assim, atua a serviço do antagonista do instinto de vida. Além disso, essa destrutividade dirigida para dentro constitui o âmago moral da personalidade adulta. A consciência, a mais querida agência moral do indivíduo civilizado, surge-nos impregnada do instinto de morte; o imperativo categórico que o superego impõe continua sendo um imperativo de autodestruição, enquanto constrói a existência social da personalidade. A obra de repressão pertence tanto ao instinto de morte quanto ao instinto de vida. Normalmente, a fusão de ambos é salutar, mas a obstinada severidade do superego ameaça constantemente esse equilíbrio salutar. Quanto mais um homem controla suas tendências agressivas em relação a outros, mais tirânico, isto é, mais agressivo se torna em seu ego-ideal ... mais intensas se tornam as tendências agressivas do seu ego-ideal contra o seu ego. Levada ao extremo, na melancolia, uma pura cultura do instinto de morte pode influir no superego, convertendo este numa espécie de local de reunião para os instintos de morte. Mas esse perigo extremo tem suas raízes na situação normal do ego. Como a ação do ego resulta em uma

'... libertação dos instintos agressivos no superego, a sua luta contra a libido expõe-no ao perigo de maus tratos e morte. Ao sofrer os ataques do superego ou talvez ao sucumbir a eles o ego está enfrentando um destino semelhante ao dos protozoários que são destruídos pelos produtos de desintegração que eles próprios criaram.'

E Freud acrescenta que do ponto de vista econômico [mental], a moralidade que funciona no superego parece ser um produto similar de desintegração.
É nesse contexto que a metapsicologia de Freud se defronta com a dialética fatal da civilização: o próprio progresso da civilização conduz à liberação de forças cada vez mais destrutivas.”
― Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud