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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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Arthur Koestler
Age: 77 †
Born: 1905
Born: September 5
Died: 1983
Died: March 1
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Buda Pest
Kösztler Artúr
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More quotes by Arthur Koestler

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Indeed, the ideal for a well-functioning democratic state is like the ideal for a gentleman's well-cut suit it is not noticed. For the common people of Britain, Gestapo and concentration camps have approximately the same degree of reality as the monster of Loch Ness. Atrocity propaganda is helpless against this healthy lack of imagination.
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 moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition.
Arthur Koestler
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The progress of science, like an ancient desert trail, is strewn with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories, doctrines, and axioms which seemed to possess eternal life.
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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I am not sure whether ethical absolutes exist. But I am sure that we have to act as if they existed or civilization perishes.
Arthur Koestler
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The disastrous history of our species indicates the futility of all attempts at a diagnosis which do not take into account the possibility that homo sapiens is a victim of one of evolution's countless mistakes.
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
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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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In creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark.
Arthur Koestler
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History is a priori amoral it has no conscience.
Arthur Koestler
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Wars are not fought for territory, but for words. Man's deadliest weapon is language. He is as susceptible to being hypnotized by slogans as he is to infectious diseases. And where there is an epidemic, the group-mind takes over.
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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History had a slow pulse man counted in years, history in generations
Arthur Koestler
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the self-assertive tendency is the dynamic expression of the holon's wholeness, the integrative tendency, the dynamic expression of its partness.
Arthur Koestler
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Honor is decency without vanity.
Arthur Koestler
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History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unnering flows towards her goal. History knows herway. She makes no mistakes.
Arthur Koestler
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Chemically induced hallucinations, delusions and raptures may be frightening or wonderfully gratifying in either case they are in the nature of confidence tricks played on one's own nervous system.
Arthur Koestler
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Wherever we find orderly, stable systems in Nature, we find that they are hierarchically structured, for the simple reason that without such structuring of complex systems into sub-assemblies, there could be no order and stability- except the order of a dead universe filled with a uniformly distributed gas.
Arthur Koestler
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one of the tests of a theory is that, once grasped, it appears self-evident.
Arthur Koestler