Arthur Koestler Quotes

The Goddamn human race deserves itself, and as far as I'm concerned it can have it.

Man has the power to act as his own destroyer - and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.

So be it. God created profoundly fallible creatures on this earth, and human history is mostly the story of error and accident.

Human brutes, like other beasts, find snares and poison in the provision of life, and are allured by their appetites to their destruction.

If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings.

History ... is little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.

White males are most responsible for the destruction of human life and environment on the planet today. Yet who is controlling the supposed revolution to change all that? White males.

The universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any human accomplishment an incredible miracle.

Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

We are a dreadful species indeed, and deserve whatever it is our techno-baubles do to us.

I like people that are real people. Real people are broad; they make mistakes.

We're such imperfect beings. I think that's more often the case than not.

For better or worse, I am as fascinated with human flaws as anything.

War is a crucial, deeply ingrained part of human history. It has to be understood.

The evil in the world is all of our own making, and it proceeds entirely from our ruthless, senseless, wasteful, destructive, and suicidal neglect of our own being.

Nothing [the demon] could think up was half as bad as the stuff [people] thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into their design somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse.

The problem with people is that they're only human.

In truth, I do not recollect in all the animal kingdom a single species but man which is eternally and systematically engaged in the destruction of its own species.

The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it..

The depraved nature of man is well known. He has a natural bias toward his own interest, which will prevail ... unless checked.

We may pretend that we're basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.

The first accounts we have of mankind are but so many accounts of their butcheries. All empires have been cemented in blood; and, in those early periods, when the race of mankind began first to form themselves into parties and combinations, the first effect of the combination, and indeed the end for which it seems purposely formed, and best calculated, was their mutual destruction.

Historically, countries have made big energy shifts only when confronted with acute fossil-fuel crises: oil embargoes, debilitating pollution, or wars.

War is human. People fight for the same reasons that the Greek Historian Thucydides identified nearly 2,500 years ago: fear, honor and interest.