Quote

Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all.

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
Logic
Accepting
Given
Reality
Ontology
Thought
Accepts
Reasoning
Uncertainty
Certainty

More quotes by 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
The closed language does not demonstrate and explain it communicates decision, dictum, command. Where it defines, the definition becomes separation of good from evil it establishes unquestionable
Herbert Marcuse
Image
Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.
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
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
Preaching nonviolence on principle reproduces the existing institutionalized violence.
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
Society ... can afford to grant more than before because its interests have become the innermost drives of its citizens.
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
Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics.
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
Glorification of the 'natural' is part of the ideology which protects an unnatural society in its struggle against liberation.
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
Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
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 existing liberties and the existing gratifications are tied to the requirements of repression: they themselves become instruments of repression.
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
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
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