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No writer or teacher or artist can escape the responsibility of influencing others whether he intends to or not, whether he is conscious of it or not.

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
Teaching
Writer
Influence
Teacher
Responsibility
Influencing
Whether
Intends
Artist
Escape
Others
Conscious

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One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions.
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Snobbery is not merely a silly human weakness but something basic in the mentality of modern man-a symptom which reflects the general sickness, the dislocation of social and cultural values in contemporary civilization.
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The jester is brother to the sage.
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Without the hard little bits of marble which are called 'facts' or 'data' one cannot compose a mosaic what matters, however, are not so much the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them.
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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.
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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.
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If the creator has a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he surely would have meant for us to stick it out.
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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.
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You can't help people being right for the wrong reasons...This fear of finding oneself in bad company is not an expression of political purity it is an expression of a lack of self-confidence.
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In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot.
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History had a slow pulse man counted in years, history in generations
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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.
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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.
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Newton's apple and Cezanne's apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem.
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A writer's ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years' time and for one reader in a hundred years' time.
Arthur Koestler
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Space-ships and time machines are no escape from the human condition. Let Othello subject Desdemona to a lie-detector test his jealousy will still blind him to the evidence. Let Oedipus triumph over gravity he won't triumph over his fate.
Arthur Koestler
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When all is said, its atmosphere [England's] still contains fewer germs of aggression and brutality per cubic foot in a crowded bus, pub or queue than in any other country in which I have lived
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.
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To want to meet an author because you like his books is as ridiculous as wanting to meet the goose because you like pate de foie gras.
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Honor is decency without vanity.
Arthur Koestler