Talk:Arthur Koestler

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Unsourced

Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable, precise and verifiable source for any quote on this list please move it to Arthur Koestler. --Antiquary 17:53, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

• "The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums." - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Mar 1979 (http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=7goAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA4&lpg=PA4&dq=The+most+persistent+sound+which+reverberates+through+man%27s+history+is+the+beating+of+war+drums&source=bl&ots=2uMaZIipTL&sig=TUuKDzHKJV7z4EmC14wD4jpWdAY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=JmebU6H-LcXJPOTNgYAE&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=The%20most%20persistent%20sound%20which%20reverberates%20through%20man's%20history%20is%20the%20beating%20of%20war%20drums&f=false)

• "A publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar."

• "Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.

• "If the creator had a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he surely meant us to stick it out."

• "The offspring in the marriage of Eros and Logos is tolerance"

• "Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion."

• "Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means."

• "Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity."

• "The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers."

• "Prometheus is reaching out for the stars with an empty grin on his face."

• "Creativity in science could be described as the act of putting two and two together to make five" (cf Orwell, in 1984)

• "Nobody before the Pythagorean had thought that mathematical relations held the secret of the universe. Twenty-five centuries later, Europe is still blessed and cursed with their heritage. To non-European civilizations, the idea that numbers are the key to both wisdom and power, seems never to have occurred."

• "When all is said, its atmosphere [England's] still contains fewer germs of aggression and brutality per cubic foot in a crowded bus, pub or queue than in any other country in which I have lived"

• "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."

• "Two half-truths do not make a truth, and two half-cultures do not make a culture."

• The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterward.