305 Quotes by Arthur Koestler

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

The eight sin, deadlier than all- self transcendence through misplaced devotion-is not included in the list.

We are indeed a blind race,′ wrote a contemporary scientist, ’and the next generation, blind to its own blindness, will be amazed at ours.

Consciousness in this view is an emergent quality, which evolves into more complex and structured states in phylogeny, as the ultimate manifestation of the Integrative Tendency towards the creation of order out of disorder, of ‘information’ out of ‘noise’.

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.

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.

The Eureka act proper, the moment of truth experienced by the creative individual, is paralleled on the collective plane by the emergence, out of the scattered fragments, of a new synthesis, brought about by a quick succession of individual discoveries-where, characteristically, the same discovery is often made by several individuals at the same time.

Coghill has shown that the motor patterns of the animal develop prior to the development of sensory innervation.

Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends.