142 Quotes by Herbert Marcuse

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.

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!

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.

Law and order are always and everywhere the law and order which protect the established hierarchy.

the optimal goal is the replacement of false needs by true ones, the abandonment of repressive satisfaction.

The capabilities (intellectual and material) of contemporary society are immeasurably greater than ever before– which means that the scope of society’s domination over the individual is immeasurably greater than ever before.

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.

The revolution is for the sake of life, not death.

[…] en esta totalidad apenas es ya posible la distinción conceptual entre los negocios y la política, el beneficio y el prestigio, las necesidades y la publicidad. Se exporta un “modo de vida”, o se exporta a sí mismo en la dinámica de la totalidad. Con el capital, los ordenadores y el saber-vivir, llegan los restantes “valores”: relaciones libidinosas con la mercancía, con los artefactos motorizados agresivos, con la estética falsa del supermercado.