Quote

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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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
Towards
Mistakes
Flow
Mistake
Goal
Inert
History
Scruples
Makes
Hesitation
Flows

More quotes by Arthur Koestler

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Every creative act – in science, art, or religion – involves a regression to a more primitive level, a new innocence of perception liberated from the cataract of accepted beliefs.
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Adolescence is a kind of emotional seasickness. Both are funny, but only in retrospect.
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The cell door slammed behind Rubishov.
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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.
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When a person identifies himself with a group his critical faculties are diminished and his passions enhanced by a kind of emotive resonance. The individual is not a killer, the group is, and by identifying with it, the individual becomes one. This is the infernal dialect reflected in man's history.
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.
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The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.
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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.
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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.
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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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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 temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan.
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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.
Arthur Koestler
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The real achievement in discoveries... is seeing an analogy where no one saw one before... The essence of discovery is that unlikely marriage of cabbages and kings — of previously unrelated frames of reference or universes of discourse — whose union will solve the previously insoluble problem.
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History is a priori amoral it has no conscience.
Arthur Koestler
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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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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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History had a slow pulse man counted in years, history in generations
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I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water, and I left Communism as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned.
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We cannot unthink unless we are insane.
Arthur Koestler