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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
Reason
Confidence
Self
Expression
Right
Company
Purity
People
Wrong
Findings
Help
Finding
Fear
Reasons
Helping
Lack
Political
Oneself

More quotes by 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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The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.
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One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up.
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 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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Newton's apple and Cezanne's apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem.
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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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.
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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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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one of the tests of a theory is that, once grasped, it appears self-evident.
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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Woe unto the defeated, whom history treads into the dust.
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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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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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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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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The revolutions of thought which shape the basic outlook of an age are not disseminated through text-books- they spread like epidemics, through contamination by invisible agents and innocent germ carriers, by the most varied forms of contact, or simply by breathing the common air.
Arthur Koestler
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Adolescence is a kind of emotional seasickness. Both are funny, but only in retrospect.
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