Arthur Koestler Quotes

The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.

What is an editor but a cross between a fall guy and a father figure? arthur koestler

The ultimate truth is penultimately a falsehood.

Each wrong idea we follow is a crime committed against future generations.

Woe unto the defeated, whom history treads into the dust.

Prometheus is reaching out for the stars with an empty grin on his face.

The discoveries of yesterday are the truisms of tomorrow, because we can add to our knowledge but cannot subtract from it.

One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions.

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

To sell oneself for thirty pieces of silver is an honest transaction; but to sell oneself to one s own conscience is to abandon mankind.

The temptation, which consisted of a single word written on the cemetary of the defeated: Sleep.

The definition of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million.

[My father] loved me tenderly and shyly from a distance, and later on took a naive pride in seeing my name in print.

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.

The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.

The hangman is a disgrace to any civilized country.

Two half truths do not make a truth.

Solitary confinement is rock bottom, it's absolute unfreedom.

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.

One of the tests of a theory is that, once grasped, it appears self-evident.

The addiction to the Soviet myth is as tenacious and difficult to cure as any other addiction.

We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can see.

History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations

The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.

Had not history always been an inhumane, unscrupulous builder, mixing its mortar of lies, blood and mud?

Brain-washing starts in the cradle.

Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

Aberrations of the human mind are to a large extent due to the obsessional pursuit of some part-truth, treated as if it were a whole truth.

Much depends on asking the right question at the right time.

The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition.

True creativity often starts where language ends.

and there was only one revolutionary virtue which he had not learned, the virtue of self-deception

If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.

Two half-truths do not make a truth, and two half- cultures do not make a culture

In any language it is a struggle to make a sentence say exactly what you mean.

Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which

One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up.

I am not sure whether ethical absolutes exist. But I am sure that we have to act as if they existed or civilization perishes.

Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality.

Every error has its consequences and venges itself unto the seventh generation.

The 'missing link' between ape and man will probably never be found- because it was an embryo.

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.

Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.

The distance between the library and the bedroom is astronomical

The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan.

Hitherto man had to live with the idea of death as an individual; from now onward mankind will have to live with the idea of its death as a species.

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.

Every creative act involves a new innocence or perception, liberated from the cataract of accepted belief.

Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.

Honor is decency without vanity.

There is an abundance of ancient place names in the Ukraine and Poland, which derive from 'Khazar' or 'Zhid' (Jew).

Nothing is worse in prison than the consciousness of one's innocenc; it prevents acclimatizatin and undermines one's morale ...

You opposed fascism, then you ditched communism.
'No, I didn't. Communism ditched me by turning into Stalinism'.

In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot.

A publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar.

God seems to have left the receiver off the hook and time is running out.

The self-assertive tendency is the dynamic expression of the holon's wholeness, the integrative tendency, the dynamic expression of its partness.

History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unnering flows towards her goal. History knows herway. She makes no mistakes.

Adolescence is a kind of emotional seasickness. Both are funny, but only in retrospect.

Newton's apple and Cezanne's apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem.

The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.

The new frontiers to be conquered are mainly in the convolutions of the cortex.

The individual is not a killer, but the group is, and by identifying with it the individual is transformed into a killer.

Creativity in science could be described as the act of putting two and two together to make five

We cannot unthink unless we are insane.

A writer's ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years' time and for one reader in a hundred years' time.

There is only one prospect worse than being chained to an intolerable existence: The nightmare of a botched attempt to end it.

A sadist is a person who is kind to a masochist.

Perhaps he did not know himself - like all these intellectual cynics ...

In creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark.

If the creator has a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he surely would have meant for us to stick it out.

Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.

The fact is: I no longer believe in my own infallibility. That is why I am lost.

History is a priori amoral; it has no conscience.

The jester is brother to the sage.