Chemically induced hallucinations, delusions and raptures may be frightening or wonderfully gratifying; in either case they are in the nature of confidence tricks played on one’s own nervous system.
~ Arthur Koestler

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The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.
~ Arthur Koestler

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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.
~ Arthur Koestler

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Aberrations of the human mind are to a large extent due to the obsessional pursuit of some part-truth, treated as if it were a whole truth.
~ Arthur Koestler

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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

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Resistance to innovation is clearly demonstrated, not by the ignorant masses, but by professionals with a vested interest in tradition and the monopoly of learning.
~ Arthur Koestler

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If Nature abhors the void, the mind abhors what is meaningless. Show a person an ink-blot, and he will start at once to organise it into a hierarchy of shapes, tentacles, wheels, masks, a dance of figures.
~ Arthur Koestler

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Indeed, the ideal for a well-functioning democratic state is like the ideal for a gentleman’s well-cut suit — it is not noticed.
~ Arthur Koestler

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