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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.

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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Faculties
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Men
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Becomes
Reflected
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Critical
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Person
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Identifying

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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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Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.
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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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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 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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History is a priori amoral it has no conscience.
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A publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar.
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We cannot unthink unless we are insane.
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Woe unto the defeated, whom history treads into the dust.
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History had a slow pulse man counted in years, history in generations
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In creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark.
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Brain-washing starts in the cradle.
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To want to meet an author because you like his books is as ridiculous as wanting to meet the goose because you like pate de foie gras.
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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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The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan.
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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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One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions.
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