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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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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
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Spread
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Contamination
Form
Forms
Agents
Germ
Thought
Shapes
Breathing
Carrier
Book
Air
Contact
Epidemics
Like
Revolution
Innocent
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Simply
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Varied
Books
Invisible
Revolutions
Disseminated
Age
Basic
Outlook
Carriers

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The cell door slammed behind Rubishov.
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If the creator has a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he surely would have meant for us to stick it out.
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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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One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions.
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The definition of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million.
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There is an abundance of ancient place names in the Ukraine and Poland, which derive from 'Khazar' or 'Zhid' (Jew).
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History is a priori amoral it has no conscience.
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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.
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The new frontiers to be conquered are mainly in the convolutions of the cortex.
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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.
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The jester is brother to the sage.
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In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot.
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The progress of science, like an ancient desert trail, is strewn with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories, doctrines, and axioms which seemed to possess eternal life.
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.
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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.
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The creativity and pathology of the human mind are, after all, two sides of the same medal coined in the evolutionary mint. The first is responsible for the splendour of our cathedrals, the second for the gargoyles that decorate them to remind us that the world is full of monsters, devils, and succubi.
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Newton's apple and Cezanne's apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem.
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...the temptation, which consisted of a single word written on the cemetary of the defeated: Sleep.
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History had a slow pulse man counted in years, history in generations
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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.
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