Herbert Marcuse

Citations

• “By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. 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.”

• “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.”

• “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.”

• “The world of immediate experience—the world in which we find ourselves living—must be comprehended, transformed, even subverted in order to become that which it really is.”

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