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History had a slow pulse man counted in years, history in generations

Arthur Koestler

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Arthur Koestler
Age: 77 †
Born: 1905
Born: September 5
Died: 1983
Died: March 1
Author
Autobiographer
Journalist
Novelist
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Writer
Buda Pest
Kösztler Artúr
History
Years
Men
Counted
Pulse
Slow
Generations

More quotes by Arthur Koestler

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When a chess player looks at the board, he does not see a static mosaic, a 'still life', but a magnetic field of forces, charged with energy - as Faraday saw the stresses surrounding magnets and currents as curves in space or as Van Gogh saw vortices in the skies of Provence.
Arthur Koestler
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There is an abundance of ancient place names in the Ukraine and Poland, which derive from 'Khazar' or 'Zhid' (Jew).
Arthur Koestler
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The individual is not a killer, but the group is, and by identifying with it the individual is transformed into a killer.
Arthur Koestler
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The jester is brother to the sage.
Arthur Koestler
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The discoveries of yesterday are the truisms of tomorrow, because we can add to our knowledge but cannot subtract from it.
Arthur Koestler
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In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot.
Arthur Koestler
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Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse.
Arthur Koestler
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Among all forms of mentation, verbal thinking is the most articulate, the most complex, and the most vulnerable to infectious diseases. It is liable to absorb whispered suggestions, and to incorporate them as hidden persuaders into the code.
Arthur Koestler
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I believe that the evidence for telepathy is overwhelming and that it is a part of reality that is above science. Science allows us to glimpse [only] fragments of reality.
Arthur Koestler
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The Revolutionary's Utopia, which in appearance represents a complete break with the past, is always modeled on some image of the Lost Paradise, of a legendary Golden Age... All utopias are fed from the source of mythology the social engineers' blueprints are merely revised editions of the ancient text.
Arthur Koestler
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The inner defenses are unconscious. They consist of a kind of magic aura which the mind builds around cherished belief. Arguments which penetrate into the magic aura are not dealt with rationally but by a specific type of pseudo-reasoning. Absurdities and contradictions are made acceptable by specious rationalizations.
Arthur Koestler
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The 'missing link' between ape and man will probably never be found- because it was an embryo.
Arthur Koestler
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In my youth I regarded the universe as an open book, printed in the language of equations, whereas now it appears to me as a text written in invisible ink, of which in our rare moments of grace we are able to decipher a small segment.
Arthur Koestler
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History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unerring, she flows towards her goal. At every bend in her course she leaves the mud which she carries and the corpses of the drowned.
Arthur Koestler
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The new frontiers to be conquered are mainly in the convolutions of the cortex.
Arthur Koestler
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...the crimes of violence committed for selfish, personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majorem gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to the flag, a leader, a religeous faith or political conviction.
Arthur Koestler
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The evils of mankind are caused, not by the primary aggressiveness of individuals, but by their self-transcending identification with groups whose common denominator is low intelligence and high emotionality.
Arthur Koestler
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Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.
Arthur Koestler
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...the temptation, which consisted of a single word written on the cemetary of the defeated: Sleep.
Arthur Koestler
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The thing represented had to pass through two distorting lenses: the artist's mind, and his medium of expression, before it emerged as a man-made dream - the two, of course, being intimately connected and interacting with each other.
Arthur Koestler