Quotes by Herbert Marcuse

"

The truth of art is the liberation of sensibility by reconciling it with reason...

"

Behind the aesthetic form is the harmony of sensibility and reason, which has been repressed, the eternal protest against the organization of life by the logic of domination.

"

It is truly an internal demand of art to make the artist take to the streets to defend the revolutionary cause...

"

There is no genuine work that does not involve intellectual effort and intellectual discipline in organizing the material. There is no "automatic" art and no "imitating" art: art understands the world. The sensible immediacy that art achieves involves a synthesis of experience, according to some universal principles, the only ones that give the work more than a particular meaning.

"

The "end of art" can only be conceived if people are no longer able to distinguish true from false, good from bad, beautiful from ugly, present from future. This would be the stage of perfect barbarism on the heights of civilization.