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The liberating force of technology the instrumentalization of things turns into ... the instrumentalization of man.

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
Liberating
Technology
Turns
Force
Things
Men

More quotes by Herbert Marcuse

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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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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.
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Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all.
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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.
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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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The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy it only testifies to the efficacy of the control.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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The people recognize themselves in their commodities they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.
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Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
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The apparatus defeats its own purpose if its purpose is to create a humane existence on the basis of a humanized nature.
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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.
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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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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
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