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

Herbert Marcuse Capitalism Philosophy Political Science Social Science

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

~ Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse Domination Elections Freedom Government Radicalism Representative Democracy Subjugation

The danger of abusing the discovery of the truth value of imagination for retrogressive tendencies is exemplified by the work of Carl Jung. More empathically than Freud, he has insisted on the cognitive force of imagination. According to Jung, phantasy is ‘undistinguishably’ united with all other mental functions, it appears ‘now as primeval, now as the ultimate and most audacious synthesis of all capabilities.’ Phantasy is above all the ‘creative activity out of which flow the answers to all answerable questions’; it is ‘the mother of all possibilities, in which all mental opposites as well as the conflict between internal and external world are united.’ Phantasy has always built the bridge between the irreconcilable demands of object and subject, extroversion and introversion. The simultaneously retrospective and expectant character of imagination is thus clearly stated: it looks not only back to an aboriginal golden past, but also forward to still unrealized but realizable possibilities.

~ Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse Freud Imagination Jung

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

Herbert Marcuse Memory Psychoanalysis Repression

The revolution is for the sake of life, not death.

~ Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse Death Eros Life Revolution Thanatos

The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and allelse, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things: bread and circuses!

~ Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse Philophical Political

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

~ Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse Soul People Kitchen

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

Herbert Marcuse Choice Human Individual