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Quote by Arthur Koestler

“The continuous disasters of man's history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a tribe, nation, church or cause, and to espouse its credo uncritically and enthusiastically, even if its tenets are contrary to reason, devoid of self-interest and detrimental to the claims of self-preservation.We are thus driven to the unfashionable conclusion that the trouble with our species is not an excess of aggression, but an excess capacity for fanatical devotion.”

Quote by Arthur Koestler

Author

Arthur Koestler

Arthur Koestler was a Hungarian-British author, journalist, and political activist. He is renowned for his novel 'Darkness at Noon' and his involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Koestler's writings frequently delved into the themes of totalitarianism and the individual's resistance to oppression. more

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“the self-assertive tendency is the dynamic expression of the holon's wholeness, the integrative tendency, the dynamic expression of its partness.”

Self Society Expression Tendencies Wholeness Assertive

Author:Arthur Koestler

“man has an irrepressible tendency to read meaning into the buzzing confusion of sights and sounds impinging on his senses; and where no agreed meaning can be found, he will provide it out of his own imagination.”

Men Found Sound Imagination Society Sight Senses Confusion Tendencies Irrepressible Sight And Sound

Author:Arthur Koestler

“The individual is not a killer, but the group is, and by identifying with it the individual is transformed into a killer.”

Individual Groups Society Transformed Killers Identifying

Book:Kaleidoscope: essays from Drinkers of infinity, and The heel of Achilles and later pieces and stories

Source: Kaleidoscope: essays from Drinkers of infinity, and The heel of Achilles and later pieces and stories

“Modern man lives isolated in his artificial environment, not because the artificial is evil as such, but because of his lack of comprehension of the forces which make it work- of the principles which relate his gadgets to the forces of nature, to the universal order. It is not central heating which makes his existence 'unnatural,' but his refusal to take an interest in the principles behind it. By being entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian.”

Source: The Act of Creation

“The more backwoodish a social group, juvenile or adult, the stricter its conception of the normal, and the readier it will ridicule any departure from it.”

Social Groups Society Normal Adults Conception Ridicule Departure Juvenile Social Groups

Book:The Act of Creation

Source: The Act of Creation

“Some tribes [of monkeys] have taken to washing potatoes in the river before eating them, others have not. Sometimes migrating groups of potato-washers meet non-washers, and the two groups watch each other's strange behavior with apparent bewilderment. But unlike the inhabitants of Lilliput, who fought holy crusades over the question at which end to break the egg, the potato-washing monkeys do not go to war with the non-washers, because the poor creatures have no language which would enable them to declare washing a diving commandment and eating unwashed potatoes a deadly heresy.”

“in the course of the last century science has become so dizzy with its successes, that it has forgotten to ask the pertinent questions- or refused to ask them under the pretext that they are meaningless, and in any case not the scientists concern.”

Lasts Courses Asks Cases Society Century Concern Scientist Forgotten Meaningless Pretext Dizzy Pertinent Pertinent Questions

Author:Arthur Koestler

“The 'missing link' between ape and man will probably never be found- because it was an embryo.”

Men Found Society Missing Links Apes Embryos

Author:Arthur Koestler

“The integrative tendencies of the individual operate through the mechanisms of empathy, sympathy, projection, introjection, identification, worship- all of which make him feel that he is a part of some larger entity which transcends the boundaries of the individual self. This psychological urge to belong, to participate, to commune is as primary and real as its opposite. The all-important question is the nature of that higher entity of which the individual feels himself a part.”

“When reality becomes unbearable, the mind must withdraw from it and create a world of artificial perfection. Plato's world of pure Ideas and Forms, which alone is to be considered as real, whereas the world of nature which we perceive is merely its cheap Woolworth copy, is a flight into delusion.”

World Mind Ideas Real Reality Form Society Pure Perfection Flight Perceive Delusion Copies Artificial Plato Unbearable Plato S

Author:Arthur Koestler