Arthur Koestler Quotes

The old disease, thought Rubashov. Revolutionaries should not think through other people's minds. Or, perhaps they should? Or even ought to? How can one change the world if one identifies oneself with everybody? How else can one change it? He who understands and forgives -- where would he find a motive to act? Where would he not?

~ Arthur Koestler

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

~ Arthur Koestler

It was quiet in the cell. Rubashov heard only the creaking of his steps on the tiles. Six and a half steps to the door, whence they must come to fetch him, six and a half steps to the window, behind which night was falling. Soon it would be over. But when he asked himself, For what actually are you dying? he found no answer.It was a mistake in the system; perhaps it lay in the precept which until now he had held to be uncontestable, in whose name he had sacrificed others and was himself being sacrificed: in the precept, that the end justifies the means. It was this sentence which had killed the great fraternity of the Revolution and made them run amuck. What had he once written in his diary? We have thrown overboard all conventions, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logic; we are sailing without ethical ballast.

~ Arthur Koestler

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

~ Arthur Koestler

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

~ Arthur Koestler

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

~ Arthur Koestler

The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.

~ Arthur Koestler

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

~ Arthur Koestler

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.

~ Arthur Koestler

... on the historical scale, the damages wrought by individual violence for selfish motives are insignificant compared to the holocausts resulting from self-transcending devotion to collectively shared belief-systems. It is derived from primitive identification instead of mature social integration; it entails the partial surrender of personal responsibility and produces the quasi-hypnotic phenomena of group-psychology.

~ Arthur Koestler

Our Press and our schools cultivate Chauvinism, militarism, dogmatism, conformism and ignorance. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national institution, and the most refined scientific system of political and mental torture. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can.

~ Arthur Koestler

...The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been.

~ Arthur Koestler

Satan, on the contrary, is thin, ascetic and a fanatical devotee of logic. He reads Machiavelli, Ignatius of Loyola, Marx and Hegel; he is cold and unmerciful to mankind, out of a kind of mathematical mercifulness. He is damned always to do that which is most repugnant to him: to become a slaughterer, in order to abolish slaughtering, to sacrifice lambs so that no more lambs may be slaughtered, to whip people with knouts so that they may learn not to let themselves be whipped, to strip himself of every scruple in the name of a higher scrupulousness, and to challenge the hatred of mankind because of his love for it--an abstract and geometric love.

~ Arthur Koestler

The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics, anything else is just a vague chatter and melts away between one’s fingers.

~ Arthur Koestler

When one contemplates the streak of insanity running through human history, it appears highly probable that homo sapiens is a biological freak, the result of some remarkable mistake in the evolutionary process. The ancient doctrine of original sin, variants of which occur independently in the mythologies of diverse cultures, could be a reflection of man's awareness of his own inadequacy, of the intuitive hunch that somewhere along the line of his ascent something has gone wrong.

~ Arthur Koestler

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

~ Arthur Koestler

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

~ Arthur Koestler

A shapeless figure bent over him, he smelt the fresh leather of the revolver belt; but what insignia did the figure wear on the sleeves and shoulder straps of its uniform—and in whose name did it raise the dark pistol barrel?A second, smashing blow hit him on the ear. Then all became quiet. There was the sea again with its sounds. A wave slowly lifted him up. It came from afar and travelled sedately on, a shrug of eternity.

~ Arthur Koestler

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

~ Arthur Koestler

The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeleton of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.

~ Arthur Koestler

Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

~ Arthur Koestler

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

~ Arthur Koestler

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.

~ Arthur Koestler

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

~ Arthur Koestler