Herbert Marcuse's Quotes

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

Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.

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 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.

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

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

That which is cannot be true.

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

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.

All day long the door of the sub-conscious remains just ajar; we slip through to the other side, and return again, as easily and secretly as a cat.

A lost but happy dream may shed its light upon our waking hours, and the whole day may be infected with the gloom of a dreary or sorrowful one; yet of neither may we be able to recover a trace.

Too late for fruit, too soon for flowers.