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“The real question I am asking here is the one Marcuse asked in the sixties. How does a way of life break down? How does it break down. And Marcuse doesn’t give the pat Marxist answer, which means economically, and we ought to be glad that that pat Marxist answer is false because if a society could be driven to ruin by debt, you know, the way a lot of people said the Russians â€� the Soviet Union â€� fell because it was broke. Let’s hope that’s not true [laughs] since we are broke, let’s hope that’s false. As a generalisation, we had better hope it is false.

How do they break down? Well, here there is an analogy â€� for me â€� between the social and the self under siege, in many ways. In many ways, not in a few, and some of the symptoms we see around us that our own lives are breaking down and the lives of our society is a generalised cynicism and scepticism about everything. I don’t know how to characterise this situation, I find no parallel to it in human history. The scepticism and cynicism about everything is so general, and I think it’s partly due to this thing I call banalisation, and it’s partly due to the refusal and the fear of dealing with complexity. Much easier to be a cynic than to deal with complexity. Better to say everything is bullshit than to try to look into enough things to know where you are. Better to say everything is justâ€� silly, or pointless, than to try to look into systems of this kind of complexity and into situations of the kind of complexity and ambiguity that we have to deal with now.”
― Rick Roderick, The Self Under Siege: Philosophy In The Twentieth Century

“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

“Marcuse's own highhanded scorn about those whom he criticizes makes it not inapposite to remark that the arguments which I have been deploying are very elementary ones, familiar to every student with the barest knowledge of logic. The suspicion is thus engendered that not only Marcuse but also Adorno and Horkheimer actually do not know any logic, and it is certainly the case that, if they do know any, all three have taken some pains to conceal their knowledge of the subject which they are professedly criticizing.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, Herbert Marcuse

“The stuff of thought is historical stuff―no matter how abstract, general, or pure it may become in philosophic or scientific theory.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society