Quote

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

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Herbert Marcuse
Age: 81 †
Born: 1898
Born: July 19
Died: 1979
Died: July 29
Philosopher
Political Theorist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Berlin
Germany
Development
Project
Society
Basic
Organizes
Others
Determine
Operative
Become
Relation
Exclusive
Whole
Institutions
Organize
Way
Projects
Tends
Life
Members
Relations
Among
Realization

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Non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself.
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The happy consciousness is shaky enough a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust.
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Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
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The existing liberties and the existing gratifications are tied to the requirements of repression: they themselves become instruments of repression.
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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.
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Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all.
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Society ... can afford to grant more than before because its interests have become the innermost drives of its citizens.
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There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop.
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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.
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The functional language is a radically anti-historical language: operational rationality has little room and little use for historical reason.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality.
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Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.
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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.
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The sickness of the individual is ultimately caused by and sustained by the sickness of his civilization
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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.
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