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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 Ghost in the Machine (1967)

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More quotes by Arthur Koestler

Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky.

The Act of Creation (1964)

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.

The more original a discovery the more obvious it seems afterwards.

The Act of Creation (1964)

Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

Drinkers of Infinity: Essays 1955-1967 (1967)

Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which — miraculously, it seems — merge into a significant event.

All Arthur Koestler quotes →

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A generation which ignores history has no past —and no future.

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love (1973)

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce Ulysses (1922)

If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!

Thomas Jefferson

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Arthur Koestler (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.