Herbert Marcuse
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.Collection: Freedom
The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.Collection: Home
Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
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.
That which is cannot be true.
Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production.
At the highest stage of capitalism, the most necessary revolution appears as the most unlikely one.
The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.
Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.
The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative.
Most people are afraid of freedom. They are conditioned to be afraid of it.Collection: People
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.Collection: Men
The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.Collection: Art
Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Attitude
Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.Collection: Earning
Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all.Collection: Reality
Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Self
The sickness of the individual is ultimately caused by and sustained by the sickness of his civilizationCollection: Love
There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop.Collection: Space
Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear – that is, if they sustain alienation. And the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls.Collection: Choices
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.Collection: Art
The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the control.Collection: Philosophy
Entertainment and learning are not opposites; entertainment may be the most effective mode of learning.Collection: Opposites
One will only be free when one plays and one's society will become a piece of art.Collection: Art
Preaching nonviolence on principle reproduces the existing institutionalized violence.Collection: Principles
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.Collection: Cutting
The Superego, in censoring the unconscious and in implanting conscience, also censors the censor.Collection: Unconscious
The world of immediate experience the world in which we find ourselves living must be comprehended, transformed, even subverted in order to become that which it really is.Collection: Order
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.Collection: Determination
The slaves of developed industrial civilization are sublimated slaves.Collection: Civilization
If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.Collection: Daughter
Technological rationality reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better domination, creating a truely totalitarian universe in which society and nature, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Political
[Art] can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Culture
If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator -- the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts.Collection: Art
Freedom of enterprise was from the beginning not altogether a blessing. As the liberty to work or to starve, it spelled toil, insecurity, and fear for the vast majority of the population. If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization.Collection: Business
The soul contains few secrets and longings which cannot be sensibly discussed, analyzed, and polled. Solitude, the very condition which sustained the individual against and beyond his society, has become technically impossible. Logical and linguistic analysis demonstrate that the old metaphysical problems are illusory problems; the quest for the "meaning" of things can be reformulated as the quest for the meaning of words, and the established universe of discourse and behavior can provide perfectly adequate criteria for the answer.Collection: Soul
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. Pbscene is not the picture of a naked woman who exposes her pubic hair but that of a fully clad general who exposes his medals rewarded in a war of aggression; obscene is not the ritual of the Hippies but the declaration of a high dignitary of the Church that war is necessary for peace.Collection: War
The functional language is a radically anti-historical language: operational rationality has little room and little use for historical reason.Collection: Historical
The apparatus defeats its own purpose if its purpose is to create a humane existence on the basis of a humanized nature.Collection: Purpose
The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Past
Glorification of the 'natural' is part of the ideology which protects an unnatural society in its struggle against liberation.Collection: Struggle
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.Collection: Thinking
The abbreviations (e.g. NATO, UN, USSR - E.W.) denote that and only that which is institutionalized in such a way that the transcending connotation is cut off. The meaning is fixed, doctored, loaded. Once it has become an official vocable, constantly repeated in general usage, "sanctioned" by the intellectuals, it has lost all cognitive value and serves merely for recognition of an unquestionable fact.Collection: Cutting
the society which projects and undertakes the technological transformation of nature alters the base of domination by gradually replacing personal dependence (of the slave on the master, the serf on the lord of the manor, the lord on the donor of the fief, etc.) with dependence on the "objective order of things" (on economic laws, the market etc.).Collection: Order
Institutionalized desublimation thus appears to be an aspect of the "conquest of transcendence" achieved by the one-dimensional society. Just as this society tends to reduce, and even absorb opposition (the qualitative difference!) in the realm of politics and higher culture, so it does in the instinctual sphere. The result is the atrophy of the mental organs for grasping the contradictions and the alternatives and, in the one remaining dimension of technological rationality, the Happy Consciousness comes to prevail.Collection: Differences