Quote

Society ... can afford to grant more than before because its interests have become the innermost drives of its citizens.

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
Afford
Interests
Citizens
Interest
Society
Innermost
Become
Grant
Drives
Grants

More quotes by Herbert Marcuse

Image
Non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself.
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
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
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
Image
The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.
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
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 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 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
The sickness of the individual is ultimately caused by and sustained by the sickness of his civilization
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
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
Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.
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
Preaching nonviolence on principle reproduces the existing institutionalized violence.
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
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
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