305 Quotes by Arthur Koestler

Good things can be created from bad.

When a person identifies himself with a group his critical faculties are diminished and his passions enhanced by a kind of emotive resonance. The individual is not a killer, the group is, and by identifying with it, the individual becomes one. This is the infernal dialect reflected in man’s history.

Space-ships and time machines are no escape from the human condition. Let Othello subject Desdemona to a lie-detector test; his jealousy will still blind him to the evidence. Let Oedipus triumph over gravity; he won’t triumph over his fate.

Newton’s apple and Cezanne’s apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem.

Had not history always been an inhumane, unscrupulous builder, mixing its mortar of lies, blood and mud?

Whatever the nature of organizing relations may be,′ J. Needham wrote in 1932, ’they form the central problem of biology, and biology will be fruitful in the future only if this is recognized. The hierarchy of relations, from the molecular structure of carbon compounds to the equilibrium of species and ecological wholes, will perhaps be the leading idea of the future.

Wars are not fought for territory, but for words. Man’s deadliest weapon is language. He is as susceptible to being hypnotized by slogans as he is to infectious diseases. And where there is an epidemic, the group-mind takes over.

The ‘missing link’ between ape and man will probably never be found- because it was an embryo.

To this day, in spite of great efforts, Lamarckism has failed to produce conclusive evidence to prove that acquired characters are transmitted to the offspring; and it seems fairly certain that, while experience does affect heredity, it does not do so in this simple and direct way.