Arthur Koestler Quotes

I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.

And every human being is precious.

Life is a difficult game. You can win it only by retaining your birthright to be a person.

I'm a human being I'm not a piece of property. I am not a consignment of goods.

All government and all private institutions must be designed to promote and protect and defend the integrity and the dignity of the individual. And that is the essential meaning of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.

Guess what? Human beings are complex.

Humans are the most complicated, nuanced things that exist. We can't be reduced to labels or summed up with five traits - even if they are the Big Five.

Individuals are complex and deserve to be recognized as such.

We are, each one of us, not just defined by the arrangement of protein molecules in our cells, but also by the things we call our own.

What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.

Human dignity ... is derived from a sense of independence.

Love says respect the other as an end unto himself or herself; never use the other as a means. Nobody is a means for you, everybody is an end. But then ambition will flop, and our whole educational system depends on ambitiousness, our politics depends on ambition, our religions depend on ambition.

Do not turn yourself from an end into a means-one does not justify the other.

I'm not a number. Dammit, I'm a man.

To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.

We are human beings, not ants.

Each of us possesses a tangible living soul. The system has no such thing. We must not allow the system to exploit us.

The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has; you may survey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the savants in the world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human personality.

Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.

The most futile thing in this world is any attempt, perhaps, at exact definition of character. All individuals are a bundle of contradictions - none more so than the most capable.

We do not choose political freedom because it promises us this or that. We choose it because it makes possible the only dignified form of human coexistence, the only form in which we can be fully responsible for ourselves. Whether we realize its possibilities depends on all kinds of things — and above all on ourselves.

When who you are and what you are is not decided by any external forces, then you are in dignity.

Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live.

The health of society thus depends quite as much on the independence of the individuals composing it as on their close political cohesion.