One question that people always ask at home is never asked here: “What happened to Communism in Russia?” Everybody yawns when a visitor brings it up, because the answer is so obvious to every Russian. The answer is that there never was Communism in Russia; there were only communists.
The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.
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.
Space-ships and time machines are no escape from the human condition.
The creative act does not create something out of nothing; it uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, and skills.
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.
What is an editor but a cross between a fall guy and a father figure? 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.
To want to meet an author because you like his books is as ridiculous as wanting to meet the goose because you like pate de foie gras.
Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.
There is only one prospect worse than being chained to an intolerable existence: The nightmare of a botched attempt to end it.
In creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark.
Creativity in science could be described as the act of putting two and two together to make five.
In my youth I regarded the universe as an open book, printed in the language of equations, whereas now it appears to me as a text written in invisible ink, of which in our rare moments of grace we are able to decipher a small segment.
Conscious and unconscious experiences do not belong to different compartments of the mind; they form a continuous scale of gradations, of degrees of awareness.
Newton’s apple and Cezanne’s apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem.
The disastrous history of our species indicates the futility of all attempts at a diagnosis which do not take into account the possibility that homo sapiens is a victim of one of evolution’s countless mistakes.
The definition of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million.
Two half-truths do not make a truth, and two half- cultures do not make a culture.
Hitherto man had to live with the idea of death as an individual; from now onward mankind will have to live with the idea of its death as a species.