Arthur Koestler - Man Quotes

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The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.

Arthur Koestler
History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations

Arthur Koestler
The sixth pre-Christian century—the miraculous century of Buddha, Confucius and Lâo-Tse, of the Ionian philosophers and Pythagoras—was a turning point for the human species. A March breeze seemed to blow across the planet from China to Samos, stirring man into awareness, like the breath of Adam's nostrils. In the Ionian school of philosophy, rational thought was emerging from the mythological dream-world.... which, within the next two thousand years, would transform the species more radically than the previous two hundred thousand had done.

Arthur Koestler
Behaviourism is indeed a kind of flat-earth view of the mind…it has substituted for the erstwhile anthropomorphic view of the rat, a ratomorphic view of man.

Arthur Koestler
If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has been afflicted by some built-in mental disorder which drives him towards self-destruction.

Arthur Koestler
The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.

Arthur Koestler
Man can leave the earth and land on the moon, but cannot cross from East to West Berlin. Prometheus reaches for the stars with an insane grin on his face and a totem-symbol in his hand.

Arthur Koestler
Man cannot inherit the past; he has to recreate it.

Arthur Koestler
The thing represented had to pass through two distorting lenses: the artist's mind, and his medium of expression, before it emerged as a man-made dream - the two, of course, being intimately connected and interacting with each other.

Arthur Koestler
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.

Arthur Koestler
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.

Arthur Koestler
But, glory be, man is not a flat-earth dweller all the time — only most of the time. Like the universe in which he lives, he is in a state of continuous creation.

Arthur Koestler
Snobbery is not merely a silly human weakness but something basic in the mentality of modern man-a symptom which reflects the general sickness, the dislocation of social and cultural values in contemporary civilization.

Arthur Koestler
Most of us were not afraid of death, only of the act of dying; and there were times when we overcame even this fear. At such moments we were free-men without shadows, dismissed from the ranks of the mortal; it was the most complete experience of freedom that can be granted a man.

Arthur Koestler