Top 80 Herbert Marcuse Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all.”

— Herbert Marcuse

2. “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.”

— Herbert Marcuse

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

— Herbert Marcuse

4. “There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop.”

— Herbert Marcuse

5. “Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.”

— Herbert Marcuse

6. “Free choice – a small selection between pre-established necessities.”

— Herbert Marcuse

7. “Entertainment and learning are not opposites; entertainment may be the most effective mode of learning.”

— Herbert Marcuse

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

— Herbert Marcuse

9. “The slaves of developed industrial civilization are sublimated slaves.”

— Herbert Marcuse

10. “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.”

— Herbert Marcuse

11. “This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression.”

— Herbert Marcuse

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

— Herbert Marcuse

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

— Herbert Marcuse

14. “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.”

— Herbert Marcuse

15. “That which is cannot be true.”

— Herbert Marcuse

16. “Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.”

— Herbert Marcuse

17. “Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.”

— Herbert Marcuse

18. “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.”

— Herbert Marcuse

19. “The precarious ontological link between Logos and Eros is broken, and scientific rationality emerges as essentially neutral.”

— Herbert Marcuse

20. “The existing liberties and the existing gratifications are tied to the requirements of repression: they themselves become instruments of repression.”

— Herbert Marcuse

21. “The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.”

— Herbert Marcuse

22. “The Superego, in censoring the unconscious and in implanting conscience, also censors the censor.”

— Herbert Marcuse

23. “This is the pure form of servitude: to exist as an instrument.”

— Herbert Marcuse

24. “The unification of opposites which characterizes the commercial and political style is one of the many ways in which discourse and communication make themselves immune against the expression of protest and refusal.”

— Herbert Marcuse

25. “At this stage, the question is no longer: how can the individual satisfy his own needs without hurting others, but rather: how can he satisfy his needs without hurting himself, without reproducing, through his aspirations and satisfactions, his dependence on an exploitative apparatus which, in satisfying his needs, perpetuates his servitude? The.”

— Herbert Marcuse

26. “Contemporary industrial society is now characterised more than ever by the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity.”

— Herbert Marcuse

27. “All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude, and the emergence of this consciousness is always hampered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions which, to a great extent, have become the individual’s own.”

— Herbert Marcuse

28. “The functional language is a radically anti-historical language: operational rationality has little room and little use for historical reason.”

— Herbert Marcuse

29. “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.”

— Herbert Marcuse

30. “The sickness of the individual is ultimately caused by and sustained by the sickness of his civilization.”

— Herbert Marcuse

31. “Glorification of the ‘natural’ is part of the ideology which protects an unnatural society in its struggle against liberation.”

— Herbert Marcuse

32. “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.”

— Herbert Marcuse

33. “Such abstraction which refuses to accept the given universe of facts as the final context of validation, such “transcending” analysis of the facts in the light of their arrested and denied possibilities, pertains to the very structure of social theory.”

— Herbert Marcuse

34. “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.”

— Herbert Marcuse

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

— Herbert Marcuse

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

— Herbert Marcuse

37. “The ontological concept of truth is in the centre of a logic which may serve as a model of pre- technological rationality. It is the rationality of a two-dimensional universe of discourse which, contrasts with the of thought and behavior that develop in the execution of the technological project.”

— Herbert Marcuse

39. “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.”

— Herbert Marcuse

40. “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.”

— Herbert Marcuse

41. “The people are led to find in the productive apparatus the effective agent of thought and action to which their personal thought and action can and must be surrendered. And in this transfer, the apparatus also assumes the role of a moral agent. Conscience is absolved by reification.”

— Herbert Marcuse

42. “The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value counts. On it centers the rationality of the status quo, and all alien rationality is bent to It.”

— Herbert Marcuse

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

— Herbert Marcuse

44. “Technology serves to institute new, more effective, and more pleasant forms of social control and social cohesion. The totalitarian tendency of these controls seems to assert itself in still another sense – by spreading to the less developed and even to the pre-industrial areas of the world, and by creating similarities in the development of capitalism and communism.”

— Herbert Marcuse

45. “To live one’s love and hatred, to live that which one is means defeat, resignation, and death. The crimes of society, the hell that man has made or man become unconquerable cosmic forces.”

— Herbert Marcuse

46. “Our mass media have little difficulty in selling particular interests as those of all sensible men. The political needs of society become individual needs and aspirations, their satisfaction promotes business and the commonweal, and the whole appeals to be the very embodiment of Reason.”

— Herbert Marcuse

47. “Behind the aesthetic form lies the repressed harmony of sensuousness and reason.”

— Herbert Marcuse

48. “The happy consciousness is shaky enough a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust.”

— Herbert Marcuse

49. “If man has learned to see and know what really is, he will act in accordance with truth, Epistemology is in itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology.”

— Herbert Marcuse

50. “The apparatus defeats its own purpose if its purpose is to create a humane existence on the basis of a humanized nature.”

— Herbert Marcuse