Quote

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

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
Culture
Discourse
Political
Commercial
Many
Protest
Way
Opposites
Make
Communication
Characterizes
Expression
Unification
Style
Refusal
Ways
Immune

More quotes by 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
Glorification of the 'natural' is part of the ideology which protects an unnatural society in its struggle against liberation.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
The ontological concept of truth is in the centre of a logic which may serve as a model of pre- technological rationality. It is the rationality of a two-dimensional universe of discourse which, contrasts with the of thought and behavior that develop in the execution of the technological project.
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
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
Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.
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
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
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
The existing liberties and the existing gratifications are tied to the requirements of repression: they themselves become instruments of repression.
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
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
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
Image
The apparatus defeats its own purpose if its purpose is to create a humane existence on the basis of a humanized nature.
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
Hypostatized into a ritual pattern, Marxian theory becomes ideology. But its content and function distinguish it from classical forms of ideology it is not false consciousness, but a rather consciousness of falsehood, a falsehood which is corrected in the context of the higher truth represented by the objective historical interest.
Herbert Marcuse
Image
Coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.
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