305 Quotes by Arthur Koestler

The deterioration of the intelligentsia is as much a symptom of disease as the corruption of the ruling class or the sleeping sickness of the proletariat.

The pressure of the environment cramps art as it cramps behaviour. One may challenge this environment, but one has to pay for it, and the price is neurotic guilt. There never was an intelligentsia without a guilt complex; it is the income tax one has to pay for wanting to make others richer.

The distance between the library and the bedroom is astronomical

Da die Freiheit eine Sache der Gradunterschiede ist, so besteht die große Gefahr, daß diejenigen, welche nicht durch Erfahrung immun geworden sind, unmerklich in die aufeinanderfolgenden Grade von Unfreiheit hineingleiten. Dies gilt für unsre ganze westliche Zivilisation. Die großen Geschichtskatastrophen, wie der Zerfall Roms, kamen nicht in einem lauten Krach, sondern sie waren wie ein sachtes Abwärtsgleiten, das Jahrhunderte oder Jahrzehnte andauern kann.

Truth is what is useful to humanity, falsehood what is harmful.

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 its orbit.

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… but wherever we applied the healing knife a new 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?

For in a struggle one must have both legs firmly planted on theearth. The Party had taught one how to do it. The infinite was apolitically suspect quantity, the `I' a suspect quality. The Party did notrecognize its existence. The definition of an individual was: a multitudeof one million divided by one million.

one of the tests of a theory is that, once grasped, it appears self-evident.