Herbert Marcuse Quotes

I do not feel certain until I have confronted my initial solution with other solutions - although in fact the first solution often proves to be the right one.

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.

Skeptics question the validity of a particular claim by calling for evidence to prove or disprove it.

The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.

One of the reasons I like Barthes more than other writers of that ilk is because he had a literary quality.

I was seeing a lot of really good things about Get Shorty when it came out, and my wife pointed out that if you validate the good reviews, you also have to validate the bad reviews.

Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.

Conventional dogmas, even if endowed with the authority of an Aristotle - ancient or modern - must be tested vigorously. If they are found wanting, we need not bother with them. But if they are found to be substantially correct, we may not overlook them.

Though what we accept be true, it is a prejudice unless we ourselves have considered and understood why and how it is true.

My profession is I'm a dissident philosopher.

I think the most important thing that young people should be taught at school is how they can decide what they're being told is true.

The duty of criticism is neither to depreciate nor dignify by partial representations, but to hold out the light of reason, whatever it may discover; and to promulgate the determinations of truth, whatever she shall dictate

Unmixed praise is not due to any one. It leaves behind a sense of unreality. We can only do justice to a great man by a discriminating criticism. Hero-worship, which paints a faultless monster, whom the world never saw, is like those modern pictures which are a blaze of light without any shadow.

I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity

Test everything, including assumptions

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.

A man’s mind is hidden in his writings: criticism brings it to light.

A great deal of contemporary criticism reads to me like a man saying, 'Of course I do not like green cheese. I am very fond of brown sherry.

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.

American literature has been, and is, singularly deficient in established critics who have anything like a rational conception of their jobs. The majority, initiate in a few of the patent rituals of Aristotle and Quintilian, don the forbidding robes of high priests to Sweetness and Light, and go about their business much as if the idea were to keep all they know to themselves.

Alternative medicine people call themselves "holistic" and say it's the "whole" approach. Well, if it's the whole approach, let it be the mind as well. Use logic, use sense, use the incredible five wits you were given by creation.

Be brutal with the past, especially your own, and have no respect for the philosophies that are foisted on you from outside.

It is commonly said that ridicule is the best test of truth; for that it will not stick where it is not just. I deny it. A truth learned in a certain light, and attacked in certain words, by men of wit and humor, may, and often doth, become ridiculous, at least so far, that the truth is only remembered and repeated for the sake of the ridicule.

The intellectual attainments of a man who thinks for himself resemble a fine painting, where the light and shade are correct, the tone sustained, the colour perfectly hamonized; it is true to life.

If you don't question the officials' role then you've got to ask what they are doing