One-Dimensional Man Quotes

“If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“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, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“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.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

“الحرية الإنسانية لا تقاس تبعاً للإختيار المتاح للفرد، وإنما العامل الحاسم والوحيد في تحديدها هو ما يستطيع الفرد اختياره وما يختاره”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“Remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“We may distinguish both true and false needs. “False” are those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. Their satisfaction might be most gratifying to the individual, but this happiness is not a condition which has to be maintained and protected if it serves to arrest the development of the ability (his own and others) to recognize the disease of the whole and grasp the chances of curing the disease. The result then is euphoria in unhappiness. Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation—liberation also from that which is tolerable and rewarding and comfortable—while it sustains and absolves the destructive power and repressive function of the affluent society. Here, the social controls exact the overwhelming need for the production and consumption of waste; the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stupefication; the need for maintaining such deceptive liberties as free competition at administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“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, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“The most effective and enduring form of warfare against liberation is the implanting of material and intellectual needs that perpetuate obsolete forms of the struggle for existence.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“For Marcuse, the distinguishing features of a human being are free and creative subjectivity. If in one’s economic and social life one is administered by a technical labor apparatus and conforms to dominant social norms, one is losing one’s potentialities of self-determination and individuality. Alienated from the powers of being-a-self, one-dimensional man thus becomes an object of administration and conformity.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“Political freedom would mean liberation of the individuals from politics over which they have no effective control. Similarly,”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“The reign of such a one-dimensional reality does not mean that materialism rules, and that the spiritual, metaphysical, and bohemian occupations are petering out. On the contrary, there is a great deal of “Worship together this week,” “Why not try God,” Zen, existentialism, and beat ways of life, etc. But such modes of protest and transcendence are no longer contradictory to the status quo and no longer negative. They are rather the ceremonial part of practical behaviorism, its harmless negation, and are quickly digested by the status quo as part of its healthy diet.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“Solitude, the very condition which sustained the individual against and beyond his society, has become technically impossible.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“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.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“rational is a mode of thought and action which is geared to reduce ignorance, destruction, brutality, and oppression”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“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.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“The standard of living attained in the most advanced industrial areas is not a suitable model of development if the aim is pacification. In view of what this standard has made of Man and Nature, the question must again be asked whether it is worth the sacrifices and the victims made in its defense. The question has ceased to be irresponsible since the “affluent society” has become a society of permanent mobilization against the risk of annihilation, and since the sale of its goods has been accompanied by moronization, the perpetuation of toil, and the promotion of frustration. Under these circumstances, liberation from the affluent society does not mean return to healthy and robust poverty, moral cleanliness, and simplicity. On the contrary, the elimination of profitable waste would increase the social wealth available for distribution, and the end of permanent mobilization would reduce the social need for the denial of satisfactions that are the individual’s own—denials which now find their compensation in the cult of fitness, strength, and regularity.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“But with all its truth, the argument cannot answer the time-honored question: who educates the educators, and where is the proof that they are in possession of “the good?”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“Whether ritualized or not, art contains the rationality of negation. In its advanced positions, it is the Great Refusal—the protest against that which is.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“We are possessed by our images, suffer our own images.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“Le persone si riconoscono nelle loro merci; trovano la loro anima nella loro automobile, nel giradischi ad alta fedeltà, nella casa a due piani, nell'attrezzatura della cucina. Lo stesso meccanismo che lega l'individuo alla sua società è mutato, e il controllo sociale è radicato nei nuovi bisogni che esso ha prodotto.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“Our society distinguishes itself by conquering the centrifugal social forces with Technology rather than Terror, on the dual basis of an overwhelming efficiency and an increasing standard of living.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“the optimal goal is the replacement of false needs by true ones, the abandonment of repressive satisfaction.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“The slaves of developed industrial Civilization are sublimated slaves, but they are slaves, for slavery is determined "neither by obedience nor by hardness of labour but by the status of being mere instrument, and the reduction of man to the state of a thing.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“[…] en esta totalidad apenas es ya posible la distinción conceptual entre los negocios y la política, el beneficio y el prestigio, las necesidades y la publicidad. Se exporta un “modo de vida”, o se exporta a sí mismo en la dinámica de la totalidad. Con el capital, los ordenadores y el saber-vivir, llegan los restantes “valores”: relaciones libidinosas con la mercancía, con los artefactos motorizados agresivos, con la estética falsa del supermercado.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“The capabilities (intellectual and material) of contemporary society are immeasurably greater than ever before– which means that the scope of society’s domination over the individual is immeasurably greater than ever before.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“This language, which constantly imposes images, militates against the development and expression of concepts.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“His argument is that the system’s much lauded economic, political, and social freedoms, formerly a source of social progress, lose their progressive function and become subtle instruments of domination which serve to keep individuals in bondage to the system that they strengthen and perpetuate. For example, economic freedom to sell one’s labor power in order to compete on the labor market submits the individual to the slavery of an irrational economic system; political freedom to vote for generally indistinguishable representatives of the same system is but a delusive ratification of a nondemocratic political system; intellectual freedom of expression is ineffectual when the media either co-opt and defuse, or distort and suppress, oppositional ideas, and when the image-makers shape public opinion so that it is hostile or immune to oppositional thought and action. Marcuse”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“For “totalitarian” is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a nonterroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests. It”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society