The Invisible Writing Quotes

“In my youth I regarded the Universe as an open book, printed in the language of physical equations, whereas now it appears to me as a text written in invisible ink, of which, in our rare moments of grace, we are able to decipher a small fragment.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing

“Up to this point, my life had been a phantom-chase after the arrow in the blue, the perfect cause, the blueprint of a streamlined Utopia. Now, with unintentional irony, I adopted as my home a country where arrows are only used on dart-boards, suspicious of all causes, contemptuous of systems, bored by ideologies, skeptical about Utopias, rejecting all blue-prints, enamored of its leisurely muddle, incurious about the future, devoted to its past. A country neither of Yogis nor of Commissars, but of potterers-in-the-garden and stickers-in-the-mud, where strikers played soccer with police and Socialists wore peers' crowns.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing

“Every period has its dominant religion and hope, and 'Socialism' in a vague and undefined sense was the hope of the early twentieth century. So much so that German 'National-Socialists', French 'Radical-Socialists', Italian 'Christian-Socialists' all felt the need to include the fetish-word into their names. In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics this hope seemed to have found its incarnation; and the magic worked, and still works, with varying degrees of intensity, on a considerable portion of mankind. The realization of the full truth about the regime which now rules one-third of the world: that it is the most inhuman regime in human history and the gravest challenge that mankind has yet encountered, is psychologically as difficult to face for most of us as an empty heaven was for Gothic man.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing