Quote

History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unerring, she flows towards her goal. At every bend in her course she leaves the mud which she carries and the corpses of the drowned.

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
Courses
Corpses
Course
Bend
Goal
Flows
Unerring
History
Carries
Inert
Every
Carrie
Scruples
Leaves
Drowned
Towards
Hesitation
Flow
Mud

More quotes by Arthur Koestler

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One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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Brain-washing starts in the cradle.
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One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up.
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The definition of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million.
Arthur Koestler
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In the meantime, the educated public continues to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutations plus natural selection -quite unaware of the fact that random mutations turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection tautology.
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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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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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Adolescence is a kind of emotional seasickness. Both are funny, but only in retrospect.
Arthur Koestler
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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
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Woe unto the defeated, whom history treads into the dust.
Arthur Koestler
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The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.
Arthur Koestler
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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.
Arthur Koestler
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in the course of the last century science has become so dizzy with its successes, that it has forgotten to ask the pertinent questions- or refused to ask them under the pretext that they are meaningless, and in any case not the scientists concern.
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