Herbert Marcuse Quotes

“Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle...The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.”

“At the present stage of advanced capitalism, organized labor rightly opposes automation without compensating employment. It insists on the extensive utilization of human labor power in material production, and thus opposes technical progress. However, in doing so, it also opposes the more efficient utilization of capital; it hampers intensified efforts to raise the productivity of labor. In other words, continued arrest of automation may weaken the competitive national and international position of capital, cause a long- range depression, and consequently reactivate the conflict of class interests.”

“It is no longer one of its tasks, the 'revolution', to radically deepen the existing currents in the existing society and to complete the course of these currents, but it has become a kind of awakening, sharpening and mobilizing those energies that seem negative in one way or another as a result of the absorption and oppression they are exposed to. It is exercised by those powers that shape human experience.”

“Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production.”

“Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another.”

“The danger of abusing the discovery of the truth value of imagination for retrogressive tendencies is exemplified by the work of Carl Jung. More empathically than Freud, he has insisted on the cognitive force of imagination. According to Jung, phantasy is ‘undistinguishably’ united with all other mental functions, it appears ‘now as primeval, now as the ultimate and most audacious synthesis of all capabilities.’ Phantasy is above all the ‘creative activity out of which flow the answers to all answerable questions’; it is ‘the mother of all possibilities, in which all mental opposites as well as the conflict between internal and external world are united.’ Phantasy has always built the bridge between the irreconcilable demands of object and subject, extroversion and introversion. The simultaneously retrospective and expectant character of imagination is thus clearly stated: it looks not only back to an aboriginal golden past, but also forward to still unrealized but realizable possibilities.”

“The intellectual is called on the carpet. Don't you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect.

You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you.”

“The means of communication, the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers to the producers and, through the latter to the whole social system.

The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood. Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior.”

“The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and allelse, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things: bread and circuses!”

“The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form.

The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.”

“The strains and stresses suffered by the individual in society are grounded in the normal functioning of that society (and of the individual!) rather than in its disturbances and diseases.”

“The term totalitarian, in fact, does not apply only to a terrorist political organization of society, but also to a non-terrorist economic-technical organization which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.

It thus precludes the emergence of an effective opposition against the whole system. Not only does a specific form of government or party domination produce totalitarianism, but also a specific system of production and distribution, a system which may well be compatible with a pluralism of parties, newspapers, counterbalancing powers, etc.”

“The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.”

“Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.”

“When the heavens do wrong the youth correct it. The opportunity has come and should not be missed!”