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819c54b
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Philosophy is the gaseous state of thought, Science its liquid state, Religion its rigid state. In all three states doubts are expressed regarding the necessity, and even the possibility, of absolute death. We shall discuss this doubt only in its liquid state. . . .
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Arthur Koestler |
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e7b1317
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Huxley was haunted by the fear that this 'Final Revolution', brought about by the combined effect of drugs and the mass media, could create 'within a generation or so for entire societies a sort of painless concentration camp of the mind, in which people will have lost their liberties in the enjoyment of a dictatorship without tears'. In other words, Huxley advocated the use of mescaline and other psychedelic drugs, to guide us along the ei..
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Arthur Koestler |
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8f89f83
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Discovery often means simply the uncovering of something which has always been there but was hidden from the eye by the blinkers of habit.
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Arthur Koestler |
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47fd4e6
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The humorist thrives on deformity; the artist deforms the world to recreate it in his own image.
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Arthur Koestler |
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6ed7efd
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For man is a symbol-making animal. He constructs a symbolic model of outer reality in his brain, and expresses it by a second set of symbols in terms of words, equations, pigment, or stone. All he knows directly are bodily sensations, and all he can directly do is to perform bodily motions; the rest of his knowledge and means of expression is symbolical. To use a phrase coined by J. Cohen, man has a metaphorical consciousness. Any attempt t..
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Arthur Koestler |
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96499e3
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I merely wish to point out that some of the major break-throughs in the history of science represent such dramatic tours de force, that 'ripeness' seems a very lame explanation, and 'chance' no explanation at all. Einstein discovered the principle of relativity 'unaided by any observation that had not been available for at least fifty years before'; the plum was overripe, yet for half a century nobody came to pluck it.
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Arthur Koestler |
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b41eaa1
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The integrative powers of life are manifested in the phenomena of symbiosis between organelles, in the varied forms of partnership within the same species or between different species; in the phenomena of regeneration, in lower species, of complete individuals from their fragments; in the re-formation of scrambled embryonic organs, etc. The self-assertive tendency is equally ubiquitous in the competitive struggle for life.
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Arthur Koestler |
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2b5cb6c
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The creative act of the humorist consisted in bringing about a momentary fusion between two habitually incompatible matrices. Scientific discovery, as we shall presently see, can be described in very similar terms-as the permanent fusion of matrices of thought previously believed to be incompatible.
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Arthur Koestler |
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b7fdc58
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Comic discovery is paradox stated-scientific discovery is paradox resolved.
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Arthur Koestler |
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e4165e5
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They looked like the meeting of a provincial town council, and were preparing the greatest revolution in human history. They were at that time a handful of men of an entirely new species: militant philosophers. They were as familiar with the prisons in the towns of Europe as commercial travellers with the hotels. They dreamed of power with the object of abolishing power; of ruling over the people to wean them from the habit of being ruled. ..
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Arthur Koestler |
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695e155
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while language facilitates communication within the group, it also crystallises cultural differences, and actually heightens the barriers between groups.
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Arthur Koestler |
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28981e4
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Insight depends on the multi-dimensional analysis of the input in its various aspects, on extracting relevant messages from irrelevant noise, identifying patterns in the mosaic until it has become saturated, as it were, with meaning.
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Arthur Koestler |
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87f29ee
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There is a strangely consistent parallel between Copernicus' character, and the humble, devious manner in which the Copernican revolution entered through the back door of history, preceded by the apologetic remark: 'Please don't take seriously - it is all meant in fun, for mathematicians only, and highly improbable indeed.
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Arthur Koestler |
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fa2bf90
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Dreaming could be described as a de-differentiation of reasoning-matrices and even, up to a point, of personal identity.
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Arthur Koestler |
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a3709d4
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The conditions for original thinking are when two or more streams of research begin to offer evidence that they may converge and so in some manner be combined. It is the combination which can generate new directions of research, and through these it may be found that basic units and activities may have properties not before suspected which open up a lot of new questions for experimental study.
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Arthur Koestler |
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4c53da6
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But there exist other, different, methods of infolding-obliquity, compression, and the Seven Types of Ambiguity-a modest estimate of Empson's. The later Joyce, for instance, makes one realize why the German word for writing poetry is 'dichten'- to condense (certainly more poetical than 'composing', i.e. 'putting together'; but perhaps less poetical than the Hungarian kolteni-to hatch). Freud actually believed that to condense or compress se..
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Arthur Koestler |
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316230e
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Only geniuses preserve their infantile voracity for 'becauses'-and the naive hope that there are real answers to every question. 'Why is the moon round? Why does the apple fall from the tree? Why are there five planets instead of twenty , and why do they move as they do? Why does milk go sour? Why could the dairymaid not get the pox? Why is the colour of a sailor's blood in the tropics a brighter red than in Hamburg? Why did the frog's legs..
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Arthur Koestler |
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748d38e
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I have no illusions about the prospects of the theory I am proposing: it will suffer the inevitable fate of being proven wrong in many, or most, details, by new advances in psychology and neurology. What I am hoping for is that it will be found to contain a shadowy pattern of truth, and that it may stimulate those who search for unity in the diverse manifestations of human thought and emotion.
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Arthur Koestler |
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1c8bdf7
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Genetic atomism is dead. Hereditary stability and hereditary change are both based, not on a mosaic of genes, but on the action of the gene-complex 'as a whole'. But this face-saving expression-which is now coming into increased use-is empty, like so many other holistic formulations, unless we interpolate between the gene-complex as a whole, and the individual gene, a hierarchy of genetic sub-assemblies-self-regulating holons of heredity, w..
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Arthur Koestler |
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9afbdb3
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The only way out of this cul-de-sac seems to be to substitute for genetic atomism, which has so drastically broken down, the concept of the genetic micro-hierarchy, with its own built-in rules, that permit a great amount of variation, but only in limited directions on a limited number of themes. This really amounts to the revival of an ancient idea which goes back to Goethe-and even further to Plato. The point is worth a short historical di..
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Arthur Koestler |
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2762115
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Neither mystic insights, nor philosophic wisdom, nor creative power can be provided by pill or injection. The psycho-pharmacist cannot add to the faculties of the brain-but he can, at best, eliminate obstructions and blockages which impede their proper use. He cannot aggrandise us-but he can, within limits, normalise us; he cannot put additional circuits into the brain, but he can, again within limits, improve the co-ordination between exis..
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Arthur Koestler |
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a08ea2d
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I have coined the term 'bisociation' in order to make a distinction between the routine skills of thinking on a single 'plane', as it were, and the creative act, which, as I shall try to show, always operates on more than one plane. The former may be called single-minded, the latter a double-minded, transitory state of unstable equilibrium where the balance of both emotion and thought is disturbed.
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Arthur Koestler |
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e475270
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skephtomoun oti pragmatika eimaste geloioi na dinoume tose semasia ston idiaitero kharaktera tou kathena* poso ligo metraei to ti einai enas anthropos kai poso pio megale semasia dinoume sto leitourgema pou tou epiballei e koinonia.
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Arthur Koestler |
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d3e85bf
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The history of science abounds with examples of discoveries greeted with howls of laughter because they seemed to be a marriage of incompatibles-until the marriage bore fruit and the alleged incompatibility of the partners turned out to derive from prejudice. The humorist, on the other hand, deliberately chooses discordant codes of behaviour or universes of discourse to expose their hidden incongruities in the resulting clash. Com
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Arthur Koestler |
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23cb70a
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The Russells arrive at the same conclusion: "There is certainly no evidence from mamamalian behaviour that social aggression is more prevalent or intense among carnivores than among herbivores. And as for humans: "There is certainly no evidence that social violence has been more prevalent or intense in carnivorous hunting than in vegetarian agricultural societies. Hunting people have sometimes been extremely war-like; but no human group has..
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Arthur Koestler |
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afee71a
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On successively higher levels of the hierarchy we find more complex, flexible and less predictable patterns of activity, while on successively lower levels we find more and more mechanised, stereotyped and predictable patterns. In the language of the physicist, a holon on a higher level of the hierarchy has more degrees of freedom than a holon on a lower level.
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Arthur Koestler |
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e925ad7
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The two together-intellectual illumination and emotional catharsis-are the essence of the aesthetic experience. The first constitutes the moment of truth; the second provides the experience of beauty. The two are complementary aspects of an indivisible process-that 'earthing' process where 'the infinite is made to blend itself with the finite, to stand visible, as it were, attainable there' (Carlyle).
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Arthur Koestler |
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53f449f
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But it was Poincare who wrote that what guided him in his unconscious gropings towards the 'happy combinations' which yield new discoveries was 'the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of number, of forms, of geometric elegance. This is a true aesthetic feeling that all mathematicians know.' The greatest among mathematicians and scientists, from Kepler to Einstein, made similar confessions. 'Beauty is the first test; there is no ..
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Arthur Koestler |
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8f5aa71
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Lastly, the vast number of existing animal species (about one million) and the small number of major classes (about fifty) and of major phyla or divisions (about ten), could be compared with the vast number of works of literature and the small number of basic themes or plots. All works of literature are variations on a limited number of leitmotivs, derived from man's archetypal experiences and conflicts, but adapted each time to a new envir..
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Arthur Koestler |
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3526654
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These waves, then, on which I sit, coming out of nothing, travelling through a non-medium in multi-dimensional non-space, are the ultimate answer modern physics has to offer to man's question after the nature of reality. The waves that seem to constitute matter are interpreted by some physicists as completely immaterial 'waves of probability' marking out 'disturbed areas' where an electron is likely to 'occur'. They are as immaterial as the..
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Arthur Koestler |
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f8d8c6c
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There is only a limited number of plots, recurring down the ages, derived from an even more limited number of basic patterns-the conflicts, paradoxes, and predicaments inherent in man's condition. And if we continue the stripping game, we find that all these paradoxes and predicaments arose from conflicts between incompatible frames of experience or scales of value, illuminated in consciousness by the bisociative act. In this final illumina..
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Arthur Koestler |
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994e804
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The problem of the planetary orbits had been hopelessly bogged down in its purely geometrical frame of reference, and when Kepler realized that he could not get it unstuck, he tore it out of that frame and removed it into the field of physics. This operation of removing a problem from its traditional context and placing it into a new one, looking at it through glasses of of a different colour as it were, has always seemed to me of the very ..
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Arthur Koestler |
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c3f8539
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Tarde muchos anos en descubrir que el inquieto viajero solo tenia una meta: huir de si mismo
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Arthur Koestler |
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22ea6dc
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En la ecuacion social, el valor de una sola vida es cero; en la ecuacion cosmica, es infinito.
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Arthur Koestler |
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7989805
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Hay dos clases de valentia: la del valiente y la del cobarde
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Arthur Koestler |
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a924926
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El valor consiste en no permitir que tus temores influyan sobre tus actos.
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Arthur Koestler |
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23cf4a2
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El marxismo, como el freudianismo ortodoxo, como el catolicismo, es un sistema cerrado. El sistema cerrado excluye la posibilidad de la argumentacion objetiva, mediante dos procedimientos relacionados entre si: a) de acuerdo con las reglas escolasticas, se quita todo valor probatorio a los hechos; b) se invalidan las objeciones desplazando la discusion al motivo psicologico que provoca la objecion.
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Arthur Koestler |
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f9ef8b4
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Lo que distingue al rebelde cronicamente indignado del revolucionario consciente es que el primero es capaz de cambiar de causa y el segundo, no. El rebelde dirige su indignacion de pronto contra esta injusticia, de pronto contra aquella; el revolucionario es un hombre que odia con metodo, que ha reunido toda su capacidad de odio en un solo objeto. El rebelde siempre tiene algun rasgo quijotesco; el revolucionario es un burocrata de la utop..
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Arthur Koestler |
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02a49c2
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In the ring this had always brought him considerable applause, but he had learned to his regret that in the class struggle the double Nelson was not done.
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Arthur Koestler |
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d9dc0f9
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Uparkhei enas agraphos kai sugkinetikos nomos pou thelei s'oles tis megales katastrophes-purkagies, plemmures, polemous-oi phtokhoi na sozoun prin ap'ola to krebbati tous.
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Arthur Koestler |
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7f27d83
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Meta apo exi bdomades monaxias, eikha toso polu sikhathei ton eauto mou, pou mou milousa ston plethuntiko kai me phonaza kurio.
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Arthur Koestler |
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1e025af
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Eikhe pia kathierothei, edo kai merika khronia, mia paradose pou elege oti oi diktatores energoun kai oi demokraties diamarturontai. Einai ena eidos katamerismou tes ergasias pou phainetai pos ikanopoiouse olon ton kosmo.
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Arthur Koestler |
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2ebd7a4
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What a mess," [Rubashov] said, "what a mess we have made of our golden age." Ivanov smiled. "Maybe," he said happily. "Look at the Gracchi and Saint Just and the Commune of Paris. Up to now, all revolutions have been made by moralizing dilettantes. 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, to settle a difference of ..
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Arthur Koestler |
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1a91463
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We said that if you don't quench those flames at once, they will spread all over the world; you thought we were maniacs. At present we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing, by hot steam, mass-electrocution and live burial of the total Jewish population of Europe. So far three million have died. It is the greatest mass-killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch. I ha..
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Arthur Koestler |