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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
bac52c7	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 le..		satan	Arthur Koestler
043f48e	Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.			Arthur Koestler
54f28ab	History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations			Arthur Koestler
6aaf8d9	The Party denied the free will of the individual - and at the same time it exacted his willing self-sacrifice. It denied his capacity to choose between two alternatives - and at the same time it demanded that he should constantly choose the right one. It denied his power to distinguish good and evil - and at the same time spoke pathetically of guilt and treachery. The individual stood under the sign of economic fatality, a wheel in a clockw..			Arthur Koestler
32877c8	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 scient..		government	Arthur Koestler
bed2275	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.		politics	Arthur Koestler
24aecac	Ivanov- "Up to now , all revolutions have been made by moralizing diletantes. They were always in good faith and perished because of their dilettantism. We for the first time are consequent..." "Yes," said Rubashov. "So consequent, that in the interests of a just distribution of land we deliberately let die of starvation about five million farmers and their families in one year. So consequent were we in the liberation of human beings from t..		politics revolution	Arthur Koestler
bc30e9b	The fact is: I no longer believe in my own infallibility. That is why I am lost.			Arthur Koestler
1199583	Honor is decency without vanity.			Arthur Koestler
66a4b53	I think most historians would agree that the part played by impulses of selfish, individual aggression in the holocausts of history was small; first and foremost, the slaughter was meant as an offering to the gods, to king and country, or the future happiness of mankind. The crimes of a Caligula shrink to insignificance compared to the havoc wrought by Torquemada. The number of victims of robbers, highwaymen, rapists, gangsters and other cr..			Arthur Koestler
359e84c	Show us not the aim without the way. For ends and means on earth are so entangled		inspirational	Arthur Koestler
f63bf3a	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 who..		politics soviet-union revolution russia	Arthur Koestler
569983e	History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unnering flows towards her goal. History knows herway. She makes no mistakes.		idealism	Arthur Koestler
2a2b2be	Some of the greatest discoveries...consist mainly in the clearing away of psychological roadblocks which obstruct the approach to reality; which is why, they appear so obvious.			Arthur Koestler
f939281	I don't approve of mixing ideologies," Ivanov continued. "There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in..		politics communism	Arthur Koestler
60010d4	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 ..		insanity	Arthur Koestler
20f5839	The greatest temptation for the like of us is: to renounce violence, to repent, to make peace with oneself. Most revolutionaries fell before this temptation, from Spartacus to Danton and Dostoevsky; they are the classical form of betrayal of the cause. The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan. As long as chaos dominates the world, God is an anachronism; and every compromise with one's own conscience ..			Arthur Koestler
8bdd665	The cause of the Party's defectiveness must be found. All our principles were right, but our results were wrong. This is a diseased century. We diagnosed the disease and its causes with microscopic exactness, but whenever we applied the healing knife anew sore appeared. Our will was hard and pure, we should have been loved by the people. But they hate us. Why are we so odious and detested? We brought you truth, and in our mouth it sounded a..			Arthur Koestler
76ac805	What had he said to them? "I bow my knees before the country, before the masses, before the whole people...." And what then? What happened to these masses, to this people? For forty years it had been driven through the desert, with threats and promises, with imaginary terrors and imaginary rewards. But where was the Promised Land? Did there really exist any such goal for this wandering mankind? That was a question to which he would have lik..		darkness-at-noon	Arthur Koestler
6884b0e	Nothing is worse in prison than the consciousness of one's innocenc; it prevents acclimatizatin and undermines one's morale...			Arthur Koestler
2d9edd6	But who will be proved right? It will only be known later. Meanwhile he is bound to act on credit and sell his soul to the devil, in the hope of history's absolution.			Arthur Koestler
63486b8	and there was only one revolutionary virtue which he had not learned, the virtue of self-deception			Arthur Koestler
2220dfe	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.		truth evil	Arthur Koestler
7ffb6cd	We brought you truth, and in our mouth it sounded a lie. We brought you freedom, and it looks in our hands like a whip. We brought you the living life, and where our voice is heard the trees wither and there is a rustling of dry leaves. We brought you the promise of the future, but our tongue stammered and barked...			Arthur Koestler
24b815e	Perhaps he did not know himself - like all these intellectual cynics...			Arthur Koestler
9e8ea4e	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.		politics darkness-at-noon soviet-union liberty	Arthur Koestler
39a5839	Cigarettes to be fetched for me from the canteen,' said Rubashov. 'Have you got prison vouchers?' 'My money was taken from me on my arrival,' said Rubashov. 'Then you must wait until it has been changed for vouchers.' 'How long will that take in this model establishment of yours?' asked Rubashov. 'You can write a letter of complaint,' said the old man. 'You know quite well that I have neither paper nor pencil,' said Rubashov. 'To buy wri..			Arthur Koestler
0b0d6f8	Much depends on asking the right question at the right time.		history discovery science innovation	Arthur Koestler
b9f596a	There was a dense fog in my brain,impenetrable to any coherent thought,except the dull obsession of counting the minutes - an aching state of semi concsiousness and numb idiocy.			Arthur Koestler
68f2f03	History has taught us that often lies serve her better than the truth; for man is sluggish and has to be led through the desert for forty years before each step in his development. And he has to be driven through the desert with threats and promises, by imaginary terrors and imaginary consolations, so that he should not sit down prematurely to rest and divert himself by worshipping golden calves.			Arthur Koestler
6aee750	that man is a reality, mankind an abstraction; that men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations; that the end justifies the means only within very narrow limits; that ethics is not a function of social utility, and charity not a petty bourgeois sentiment but the gravitational force which keeps civilization in ..			Arthur Koestler
5adaab7	That was probably the reason that history was more of an oracle than a science. Perhaps later, muck later, it would be taught by means of tables of statistics, supplemented by anatomical sections. The teacher would draw on the blackboard an algebraic formula representing the conditions of life of the masses of a particular nation at a particular period: 'Here, citizens, you see the objective factors which conditioned this historical process..			Arthur Koestler
733b4ea	Every jump of technical progress leaves the relative intellectual development of the masses a step behind, and thus causes a fall in the political-maturity thermometer. It takes sometimes tens of years, sometimes generations, for a people's level of understanding gradually to adapt itself to the changed state of affairs, until it has recovered the same capacity for self-government as it had already possessed at a lower stage of civilization..			Arthur Koestler
4e4f542	Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.			Arthur Koestler
a4550cf	Only once did he remark when the starter,which he was trying to open,literally fell to pieces in his hands,:'If you would write for those filthy boulevard papers,monsieur,you could soon buy a Chevrolet'(which was quite unture:In France the prostitutes of the pen were just as badly rewarded as their colleagues on the street corners).			Arthur Koestler
ef57832	Oi anthropoi den einai sunekheia dustukhismenoi para mono sta kaka muthistoremata* sten pragmatikoteta einai polu apaskholemenoi.			Arthur Koestler
4b9806a	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.			Arthur Koestler
64900ea	There were so many who wished to speak. For the movement was without scruples; she rolled towards her goal unconcernedly and deposed the corpses of the drowned in the windings; such was the law of her being. And whosoever could not follow her crooked course was washed on to the bank, for such was her law. The motives of the individual did not matter to her. His conscience did not matter to her, neither did she care what went on in his head ..			Arthur Koestler
5a39ffb	Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends.			Arthur Koestler
ba62e1e	Not only the portraits on the walls, but also the shelves in the library were thinned out. The disappearance of certain books and brochures happened discretely, usually the day after the arrival of a new message from above. Rubashov made his sarcastic commentaries on it while dictating to Arlova, who received them in silence. Most of the works on foreign trade and currency disappeared from the shelves - their author, the People's Commissar ..			Arthur Koestler
6680ea7	O progresso da ciencia, tal como uma antiga trilha no deserto, esta juncado pelos descolorados esqueletos de teorias rejeitadas, que um dia pareceram ter vida eterna.		science philosophy-of-science	Arthur Koestler
41a7634	He found out that those processes wrongly known as "monologues" are really dialogues of a special kind; dialogues in which one partner remains silent while the other against all grammatical rules, addresses him as "I" instead of "you", in order to creep into his confidence and to fathom his intentions; but the silent partner just remains silent, shuns observation and even refuses to be localized in time and space."			Arthur Koestler
5fec47f	It had a strange resemblance to Kafka's novel,The Trial- that dream-like allegory of a man who,having received a mysterious convocation to attend his 'trial",strives and struggles in vain to find out where the trial would be held and what it would be about; wherever he inquires he receives non - commital,elusive replies,as if everybody has joined in a secret conspiracy:the closer he gets to his aim,the farther it recedes,like the transparen..			Arthur Koestler
bcda455	For in a struggle one must have both legs firmly planted on the earth. The Party had taught one how to do it. The infinite was a politically suspect quantity, the `I' a suspect quality. The Party did not			Arthur Koestler

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