Quote

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

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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
Needs
Individual
Interests
Men
Business
Satisfaction
Promotes
Political
Difficulty
Embodiment
Become
Mass
Aspirations
Littles
Media
Aspiration
Reason
Particular
Sensible
Little
Interest
Appeals
Whole
Society
Selling

More quotes by Herbert Marcuse

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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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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.
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Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.
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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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This organization of functional discourse is of vital importance it serves as a vehicle of coordination and subordination. The unified, functional language is an irreconcilably anti-critical and anti-dialectical language. In it, operational and behavioral rationality absorbs the transcendent, negative, oppositional elements of Reason.
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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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However, if free choice means more than a small selection between pre-established necessities, and if the inclinations and impulses used in work are other than those preshaped by a repressive reality principle, then satisfaction in daily work is only a rare privilege.
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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.
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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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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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The happy consciousness is shaky enough a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust.
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This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression.
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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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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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The liberating force of technology the instrumentalization of things turns into ... the instrumentalization of man.
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The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality.
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Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
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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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Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics.
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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.
Herbert Marcuse