Quote

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

Herbert Marcuse

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Herbert Marcuse
Age: 81 †
Born: 1898
Born: July 19
Died: 1979
Died: July 29
Philosopher
Political Theorist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Berlin
Germany
Become
Reason
Fatally
Entangled
Domination
Society

More quotes by Herbert Marcuse

Image
The happy consciousness is shaky enough a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
To the degree to which they correspond to the given reality, thought and behavior express a false consciousness, responding to and contributing to the preservation of a false order of facts. And this false consciousness has become embodied in the prevailing technical apparatus which in turn reproduces it.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
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.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy it only testifies to the efficacy of the control.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
Glorification of the 'natural' is part of the ideology which protects an unnatural society in its struggle against liberation.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
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.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not - in his mind - undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
Preaching nonviolence on principle reproduces the existing institutionalized violence.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
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.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
The liberating force of technology the instrumentalization of things turns into ... the instrumentalization of man.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
However, if free choice means more than a small selection between pre-established necessities, and if the inclinations and impulses used in work are other than those preshaped by a repressive reality principle, then satisfaction in daily work is only a rare privilege.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
Self-determination, the autonomy of the individual, asserts itself in the right to race his automobile, to handle his power tools, to buy a gun, to communicate to mass audiences his opinion, no matter how ignorant, how aggressive, it may be.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
Society ... can afford to grant more than before because its interests have become the innermost drives of its citizens.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
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
Image
Our mass media have little difficulty in selling particular interests as those of all sensible men. The political needs of society become individual needs and aspirations, their satisfaction promotes business and the commonweal, and the whole appeals to be the very embodiment of Reason.
Herbert Marcuse