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Quotes from One-Dimensional Man — Herbert Marcuse

1898–1979 Germany

← All quotes by Herbert Marcuse

48 quotes

The present stage redefines the possibilities of man and nature in accordance with the new means available for their realization.

One-Dimensional Man (1964)

The avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will.

One-Dimensional Man (1964)

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

One-Dimensional Man (1964)

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

One-Dimensional Man (1964)

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.

One-Dimensional Man (1964)

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.

One-Dimensional Man (1964)

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.

One-Dimensional Man (1964)

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

One-Dimensional Man (1964)

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

One-Dimensional Man (1964)

The slaves of developed industrial civilization are sublimated slaves.

One-Dimensional Man (1964)

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

One-Dimensional Man (1964)

It is the sphere farthest removed from the concreteness of society which may show most clearly the extent of the conquest of thought by society.

One-Dimensional Man (1964)

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

One-Dimensional Man (1964)

The liberating force of technology—the instrumentalization of things—turns into … the instrumentalization of man.

One-Dimensional Man (1964)

Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual, and industrial psychology has long since ceased to be confined to the factory.

One-Dimensional Man (1964)

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

One-Dimensional Man (1964)

The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality.

One-Dimensional Man (1964)

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

One-Dimensional Man (1964)

Non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself.

One-Dimensional Man (1964)

Society … can afford to grant more than before because its interests have become the innermost drives of its citizens.

One-Dimensional Man (1964)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Herbert Marcuse (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.