Quote

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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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
Whether
Fronts
Informed
House
Front
Hanging
Believe
Asked
Surely
Horseshoe
Really
Doors
Famous
Bohr
World
Somebody
Brings
Horseshoes
Bring
Luck
Reliably
Courses
Door
Physicist
Course
Atheism
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Honor is decency without vanity.
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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 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.
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The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.
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Chemically induced hallucinations, delusions and raptures may be frightening or wonderfully gratifying in either case they are in the nature of confidence tricks played on one's own nervous system.
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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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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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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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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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The 'missing link' between ape and man will probably never be found- because it was an embryo.
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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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A publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar.
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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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In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot.
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Brain-washing starts in the cradle.
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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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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.
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.
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...the crimes of violence committed for selfish, personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majorem gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to the flag, a leader, a religeous faith or political conviction.
Arthur Koestler