Arthur Koestler Quotes

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

Captain Hale, alone, without sympathy or support, save that from above, on the near approach of death asked for a clergyman to attend him. It was refused. He then requested a Bible; that too was refused by his inhuman jailer.

I was glad when the invalids were executed

Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.

For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing.

The existence of the soldier, next to capital punishment, is the most grievous vestige of barbarism which survives among men.

The poor sinner was weak and ill, so she had to be led to the scaffold. When she sat down on the chair, Master Valtin the executioner walked around her like a cat walks around hot broth. He held the sword a span from her neck, took aim, and struck the blow, but missed her neck and struck off a slice of her head as big as a coin, knocking her from the chair. Then the poor soul got up quicker than she had sat down, this blow having done no harm to her. Then she started to beg to be let go, as she had been so brave. But to no avail. She had to sit down again. The assistant then wanted to take the sword from Master Valtin and strike her himself, but the master would not permit this and struck her again himself. The second blow was a little stronger and she fell from the chair. Then he cut off her head as she lay on the scaffold. The executioner received his reward as he went. He would have been stoned to death if the town guard and their arms had not rescued him. As it was, much blood was already streaming from his head.

I find man's inhumanity to man extraordinary,,, I can't get my head around it.

I think that the worst thing is realizing that mankind - that - that human beings can be so horrible to other human beings.

Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt.

In a few days, I will have them all guillotined in Paris.

As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis.

Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.

There's something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.

That is the explanation of war, an outrage by humanity upon humanity in despite of humanity.

He told us that most of us would die violently, and those who did not would be brought down to the level of beasts.

The smell of death overwhelmed us even before we passed through the stockade. More than 3200 naked, emaciated bodies had been flung into shallow graves. Others lay in the streets where they had fallen. ... Eisenhower's face whitened into a mask. Patton walked over to a corner and sickened. I was too revolted to speak. For here death had been so fouled by degradation that it both stunned and numbed us.

Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.

At Auschwitz, not only man died, but also the idea of man. To live in a world where there is nothing anymore, where the executioner acts as god, as judge-many wanted no part of it. It was its own heart the world incinerated at Auschwitz.

He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.

Violence is the ultimate human degradation.

The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.

The things I saw beggar description ... The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty, and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where there were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to "propaganda".

It appeared that most of the men and boys had died of starvation; they had not been executed. But the manner of death seemed unimportant. Murder had been done at Buchenwald. God alone knows how many men and boys have died there during the last twelve years.