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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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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
Deeper
Edifice
Authority
Constructed
Intellectual
Evoke
Oracular
Fear
Mediocrity
Mediocrities
Might
Collapse
Endangers
Whole
Academic
Laboriously
Innovation
Twofold
Threat
Evokes

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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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.
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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 self-assertive tendency is the dynamic expression of the holon's wholeness, the integrative tendency, the dynamic expression of its partness.
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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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The inner defenses are unconscious. They consist of a kind of magic aura which the mind builds around cherished belief. Arguments which penetrate into the magic aura are not dealt with rationally but by a specific type of pseudo-reasoning. Absurdities and contradictions are made acceptable by specious rationalizations.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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In creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark.
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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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One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions.
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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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The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.
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...the temptation, which consisted of a single word written on the cemetary of the defeated: Sleep.
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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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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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Newton's apple and Cezanne's apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem.
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Adolescence is a kind of emotional seasickness. Both are funny, but only in retrospect.
Arthur Koestler