What is an editor but a cross between a fall guy and a father figure? arthur koestler

The progress of science, like an ancient desert trail, is strewn with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories, doctrines, and axioms which seemed to possess eternal life.

Most of us were not afraid of death, only of the act of dying; and there were times when we overcame even this fear. At such moments we were free-men without shadows, dismissed from the ranks of the mortal; it was the most complete experience of freedom that can be granted a man.

The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.

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

The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics; anything else is just a vague chatter and melts away between one’s fingers.

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.