Quote

The existing liberties and the existing gratifications are tied to the requirements of repression: they themselves become instruments of repression.

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
Liberty
Gratifications
Become
Repression
Liberties
Gratification
Requirements
Existing
Tied
Instruments

More quotes by Herbert Marcuse

Image
Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.
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
The way in which a society organizes the life of its members ... is one project of realization among others. But once the project has become operative in the basic institutions and relations, it tends to become exclusive and to determine the development of the society as a whole.
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
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
The judgment that human life is worth living, or rather can and ought to be made worth living, ... underlies all intellectual effort it is the a priori of social theory, and its rejection (which is perfectly logical) rejects theory itself.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
The sickness of the individual is ultimately caused by and sustained by the sickness of his civilization
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
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
The liberating force of technology the instrumentalization of things turns into ... the instrumentalization of man.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
The avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
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.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
The people recognize themselves in their commodities they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.
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
The people are led to find in the productive apparatus the effective agent of thought and action to which their personal thought and action can and must be surrendered. And in this transfer, the apparatus also assumes the role of a moral agent. Conscience is absolved by reification.
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
The functional language is a radically anti-historical language: operational rationality has little room and little use for historical reason.
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