142 Quotes by Herbert Marcuse

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.

At the highest stage of capitalism, the most necessary revolution appears as the most unlikely one.

Most people are afraid of freedom. They are conditioned to be afraid of it.

The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative.

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.

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

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

The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.

The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the control.