Quote

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.

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
Choice
Determining
Open
Decisive
Choices
Factor
Freedom
Factors
Individual
Range
Human
Degree
Humans
Chosen
Degrees

More quotes by 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
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 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
This (functional - E.W.) language controls by reducing the linguistic forms and symbols of reflection, abstraction, development, contradiction by substituting images for concepts. It denies or absorbs the transcendent vocabulary it does not search for but establishes and imposes truth and falsehood.
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
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 existing liberties and the existing gratifications are tied to the requirements of repression: they themselves become instruments of repression.
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
Precisely because Galilean science is, in the formation of its concepts, the technic of a specific Lebenswelt , it does not and cannot transcend this Lebenswelt . It remains essentially within the basic experiential framework and within the universe of ends set by this reality.
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
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
Preaching nonviolence on principle reproduces the existing institutionalized violence.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
The unification of opposites which characterizes the commercial and political style is one of the many ways in which discourse and communication make themselves immune against the expression of protest and refusal.
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
In its relation to the reality of daily life, the high culture of the past was many things opposition and adornment, outcry and resignation. But it was also the appearance of the realm of freedom: the refusal to behave.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
The happy consciousness is shaky enough a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust.
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
The liberating force of technology the instrumentalization of things turns into ... the instrumentalization of man.
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