The 23 best quotes by Herbert Marcuse

We review the famous quotes of one of the best thinkers of the Frankfurt School.

Herbert Marcuse (Berlin, 1898 - Starnberg, 1979) was a German philosopher and sociologist, a key figure among the thinkers who made up the Frankfurt School.

A contemporary and friend of philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, Herbert Marcuse was also in contact with Max Horkheimer after the rise of the National Socialist party to power of the German nation. In those years of genocide, Marcuse went into exile in Switzerland and later to France, where he was also in contact with Erich Fromm and Theodor Adorno.

Later, already in the United States, he worked as a philosopher and professor at Harvard, where he wrote and dissected the hippie movement. hippie movement and the various social changes of the time.

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Phrases and famous quotes by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse.

Herbert Marcuse opposed to the capitalist society.. One of his works is still studied by Marxist and post-Marxist theorists: One-dimensional man (1964).

In this article we are going to know the best famous quotes and phrases of Herbert Marcuse, to get closer to the thought of the man who was nicknamed "the father of the New Left".

Under the rule of a repressive totality, freedom can become a powerful instrument of domination.

A paradox that continues to occur in many societies in the 21st century.

2. Freedom from politics would mean the liberation of individuals from a politics over which they exercise no effective control. In the same way, intellectual freedom would mean the restoration of individual thought now absorbed by mass communication and indoctrination, the abolition of public opinion along with its creators.

A critique of the control of public opinion exercised by the mass media.

3. Literature and art were a rational cognitive force that revealed a dimension of man and nature that was repressed and rejected in reality.

In this sentence, Herbert Marcuse explains the psychological background of the human need to transcend life through art.

Romantic' is a term of condescending defamation that is easily applied to avant-garde positions.

When a thinker steps outside the orthodox channels of power, he is labeled a romantic.

5. Is it really possible to differentiate between the mass media as instruments of information and entertainment, and as means of manipulation and indoctrination?

Another famous quote that calls into question the purpose of the media.

6. Domination has its own aesthetics and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics.

A phrase that summarizes the deception of some modern democracies.

7. The social organization of sexual instincts makes taboo as perversions practically all their manifestations that do not serve or prepare for the procreative function. Without the most severe limitations, they would counteract sublimation, on which the growth of culture depends.

A famous quote about sexual instincts that could have been signed by Sigmund Freud himself.

8. The free choice of masters suppresses neither masters nor slaves. Choosing freely among a wide variety of goods and services does not mean freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear, that is, if they sustain alienation.

A critique of capitalism and its appearances.

9. The more important the intellectual, the more sympathetic he will be to the rulers.

The financial and economic elites tend to elevate those thinkers who are indulgent with their bad practices.

10. All liberation depends on the awareness of servitude, and the emergence of this awareness is always hindered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions which, to the highest degree, have become the individual's own.

On freedom and one of its possible impediments.

11. An absence of comfortable, soft, reasonable and democratic freedom, a sign of technical progress, prevails in advanced industrial civilization.

A perfect x-ray of the limits of freedom based on consumption and apparent comfort.

12. Entertainment and learning are not opposed; entertainment can be the most effective way to learn.

Without emotion and motivation there can be no meaningful learning.

13. It is only thanks to those without hope that we are given hope.

A paradox that warns us that only those who cling to freedom will be able to achieve it.

14. The judgment that human life deserves to be lived, or rather that it can be and must be lived.

A sentence to free interpretation.

15. Technology as such cannot be separated from the use that is made of it; technological society is a system of domination that operates already in the concept and construction of techniques.

The use and abuse of technology and its implementation in production are key elements in rethinking the future of humanity.

16. By censoring the unconscious and implanting consciousness, the superego also censors the censor, because the developed consciousness registers the forbidden evil act not only in the individual but also in his society.

A famous quotation that tells us about the Freudian Ego, Ego and Superego.

17. The principle of reality materializes in a system of institutions. And the individual, growing up within such a system, learns the requirements of the reality principle, such as those of law and order, and passes them on to the next generation.

The infrastructure of society determines what we consider acceptable and common.

18. The libido is diverted to act in a socially useful way, within which the individual works for himself only insofar as he works for the apparatus, and is engaged in activities that do not generally coincide with his own faculties and desires.

On the libido and how our belief system influences our carnal desires.

19. The restoration of the rights of memory is a vehicle of liberation. Without the liberation of the repressed content of memory, without the liberation of its liberating power; non-repressive sublimation is unimaginable (...) Time loses its power when memory redeems the past.

On historical memory and the unconscious mechanisms it is capable of repairing.

20. While the struggle for truth "saves" reality from destruction, truth compromises and compromises human existence. It is the essentially human project. If man has learned to see and know what he really is, he will act in accordance with truth. Epistemology is itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology.

A famous quote from Herbert Marcuse on truth, in the midst of the post-truth era.

21. Closed language neither demonstrates nor explains: it communicates decisions, judgments, orders. When it defines, definition becomes "separation of right and wrong"; it establishes right and wrong without allowing doubts, and one value as justification for another. It moves by tautologies, but tautologies are terribly effective "sentences". They express judgment in a "prejudiced way"; they pronounce condemnations.

About language and how it determines our scale of moral values about things.

22. The one-dimensional individual is characterized by his delirium of persecution, his internalized paranoia through mass communication systems. Even the very notion of alienation is indisputable because this one-dimensional man lacks a dimension capable of demanding and enjoying any progress of his spirit. For him, autonomy and spontaneity have no meaning in his prefabricated world of prejudices and preconceived opinions.

An excerpt from his best known work.

23. Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the establishment, which abuses the duration of its application, not to expressions of its own morality, but to those of another.

Ethics and morality were two key elements in Marcuse's philosophical study.