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We cannot unthink unless we are insane.

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
Cannot
Thinking
Insanity
Insane
Unless

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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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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 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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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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Woe unto the defeated, whom history treads into the dust.
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 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.
Arthur Koestler
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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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Honor is decency without vanity.
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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one of the tests of a theory is that, once grasped, it appears self-evident.
Arthur Koestler
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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.
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.
Arthur Koestler
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...the temptation, which consisted of a single word written on the cemetary of the defeated: Sleep.
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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History is a priori amoral it has no conscience.
Arthur Koestler
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In creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark.
Arthur Koestler
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One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions.
Arthur Koestler
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The disastrous history of our species indicates the futility of all attempts at a diagnosis which do not take into account the possibility that homo sapiens is a victim of one of evolution's countless mistakes.
Arthur Koestler