305 Quotes by Arthur Koestler

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.

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

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.

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

The continuous disasters of man's history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a tribe, nation, church or cause, and to espouse its credo uncritically and enthusiastically, even if its tenets are contrary to reason, devoid of self-interest and detrimental to the claims of self-preservation.We are thus driven to the unfashionable conclusion that the trouble with our species is not an excess of aggression, but an excess capacity for fanatical devotion.

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

Man's destiny was no longer determined from 'above' by a super-human wisdom and will, but from 'below' by the sub-human agencies of glands, genes, atoms, or waves of probability. ...they could determine his fate, but could provide him with no moral guidance, no values and meaning. A puppet of the Gods is a tragic figure, a puppet suspended on his chromosomes is merely grotesque.

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

The real achievement in discoveries ... is seeing an analogy where no one saw one before. .. The essence of discovery is that unlikely marriage of ... previously unrelated forms of reference or universes of discourse, whose union will solve the previously insoluble problem.