Arthur Koestler Quotes

The world is not run by thought, nor by imagination, but by opinion.

Nondemocratic regimes imperil the security of the world. They stay in power by controlling their populations. This control invariably requires an increasing amount of repression. To justify this repression and maintain internal stability, external enemies must be manufactured.

The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat ... [is a] state that is democratic for the proletariat and the poor in general.

Listen, we’re making good progress in Iraq. Sometimes its hard to tell it when you listen to the filter.

It pains me to see the gap that exists in the public's consciousness - religious and secular - between the notion of Israel as a Jewish state and as a democratic state.

Fact check: The examples of failed socialism that critics use are not socialist democracies but authoritarian states led by corrupt, ruthless, and paranoid dictators.

The aspiring tyrants of today have not forgotten the lesson of 1933: that acts of terror - real or fake, provoked or accidental - can provide the occasion to deal a death blow to democracy.

Every time I talk to somebody about Putin, it's like, 'But isn't he vastly popular?' Is that really the most important question? I mean, we can unpack his popularity. I think it's manufactured. I think it's manufactured through totalitarian mechanisms.

In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.

Economics and politics are so intertwined and interlinked that politics now, mainstream politics, extreme center politics, are little else but a version of concentrated economics. And this means that any alternative - alternative capitalism, left Keynesianism, intervention by the state to help the poor, rolling back the privatizations - becomes a huge issue. The entire weight of the extreme center and its media is turned against it, which in reality now is beginning to harm democracy.

The polls demonstrate that 50 percent of Americans who get their news from TV think Saddam Hussein was behind the Twin Towers attack. Man, have they got ways for getting half-truths out right away now, thanks to TV! I think TV is a calamity in a democracy.

Behind the deceptive words designed to entice people into supporting violence -- words like democracy, freedom, self-defense, national security -- there is the reality of enormous wealth in the hands of a few, while billions of people in the world are hungry, sick, homeless.

Once we recognize the power of propaganda, we need to ask whether its exercise is consistent with those democratic ideals to which lip-service is commonly accorded.

How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?

States have always needed intellectuals to con the public into believing that its rule is wise, good, and inevitable

But for the media to name their coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq the same as what the Pentagon calls it — everyday seeing 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' — you have to ask: 'If this were state controlled media, how would it be any different?'

Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors; the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.

You actually cannot sell the idea of freedom, democracy, diversity, as if it were a brand attribute and not reality -- not at the same time as you're bombing people, you can't.

Polls are the corporate media's standardized tests to determine how well we have learned what it has taught us.

I just find it absolutely amazing that the narrative about this situation is not put out publically in the press, because it doesn't suit the Western establishment narrative - that yes, the West has political prisoners, it's a reality, it's not just me, there's a bunch of other people as well.

Because they don't teach the truth about the world, schools have to rely on beating students over the head with propaganda about democracy. If schools were, in reality, democratic, there would be no need to bombard students with platitudes about democracy. They would simply act and behave democratically, and we know this does not happen. The more there is a need to talk about the ideals of democracy, the less democratic the system usually is.

Mr. Bush, I don't recognize the world you paint. I find your speech a form of sheer propaganda, having almost no relationship to reality. ...You can't 'stay the course' because you don't have a course.

People who live under fascism are not only miserable but they're full of shame. You just don't go in and inject democracy into them. They're half crazy with their own.

Pick the topic you like: the Middle East, international terrorism, Central America, whatever it is - the picture of the world that's presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality. The truth of the matter is buried under edifice after edifice of lies upon lies. It's all been a marvelous success from the point of view in deterring the threat of democracy, achieved under conditions of freedom, which is extremely interesting. It's not like a totalitarian state, where it's done by force. These achievements are under conditions of freedom.