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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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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
Fear
Reasons
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Political
Oneself
Reason
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Self
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More quotes by Arthur Koestler

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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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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.
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The jester is brother to the sage.
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The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan.
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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
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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.
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Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
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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.
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Faith is a wondrous thing it is not only capable of moving mountains, but also of making you believe that a herring is a race horse.
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Brain-washing starts in the cradle.
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Somebody once asked Niels Bohr why he had a horseshoe hanging above the front door of his house. Surely you, a world famous physicist, can't really believe that hanging a horseshoe above your door brings you luck? Of course not, Bohr replied, but I have been reliably informed that it will bring me luck whether I believe in it or not.
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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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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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Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself. Boredom sets into boring minds. The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.
Arthur Koestler
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The more backwoodish a social group, juvenile or adult, the stricter its conception of the normal, and the readier it will ridicule any departure from it.
Arthur Koestler
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History had a slow pulse man counted in years, history in generations
Arthur Koestler
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When reality becomes unbearable, the mind must withdraw from it and create a world of artificial perfection. Plato's world of pure Ideas and Forms, which alone is to be considered as real, whereas the world of nature which we perceive is merely its cheap Woolworth copy, is a flight into delusion.
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In creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark.
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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.
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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.
Arthur Koestler