Arthur Koestler Quotes on Faith, Communism, And The Nature of Man

On faith. “A faith is not acquired by reasoning. One does not fall in love with a woman, or enter the womb of a church, as a result of logical persuasion. Reason may defend an act of faith—but only after the act has been committed, and the man committed to the act.” 

On rational political calculations. “Men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations.”

On charity. “Charity is not a petty-bourgeois sentiment but the gravitational force which keeps civilization in its orbit.” 

On communist discourse. “Two hours of this dialectical tom-tom and you didn’t know whether you were a boy or a girl, and were ready to believe either as soon as the rejected alternative appeared in inverted commas.” 

Even revolutionaries look to the past for inspiration. “The revolutionary’s Utopia, which in appearance represents a complete break with the past, is always modeled on some image of the lost Paradise, of a legendary Golden Age.”

On history. “The swinging of this pendulum from rationalistic to romantic periods and back is not contradictory to the conception of a basic dialectic movement of History. They are like the tidal waves on a river which yet flows into the sea.”  

On ideology. “Psychology became greatly simplified: there were two recognized emotive impulses: class solidarity and the sexual urge. The rest was ‘bourgeois metaphysics’; or, like ambition and the lust for power, ‘products of competitive capitalist economy.’” 

How the communist party ruled out democratic deliberation. ‘One of the slogans of the German Party said: The front-line is no place for discussions.’ Another said: ‘Wherever a Communist happens to be, he is always in the front-line.’

Man vs mankind. “That man is a reality, mankind an abstraction.”