The God that Failed Quotes

“that man is a reality, mankind an abstraction; that 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; that the end justifies the means only within very narrow limits; that ethics is not a function of social utility, and charity not a petty bourgeois sentiment but the gravitational force which keeps civilization in its orbit.”
― Arthur Koestler, The God that Failed

“Persuasion may play a part in a man's conversion; but only the part of bringing to its full and conscious climax a process which has been maturing in regions where no persuasion can penetrate. A faith is not acquired; it grows like a tree.”
― Arthur Koestler, The God that Failed

“The addiction to the Soviet myth is as tenacious and difficult to cure as any other addiction.”
― Arthur Koestler, The God that Failed

“Generally speaking, words like 'agent of,' 'Democracy,' 'Freedom,' etc. meant something quite different in Party usage from what they meant in general usage; and as, furthermore, even their Party meaning changed with each shift of the line, our polemical methods became rather like the croquet game of the Queen of Hearts, in which the hoops moved about the field and the balls were live hedgehogs. With this difference, that when a player missed his turn and the Queen shouted 'Off with his head,' the order was executed in earnest. To survive, we all had to become virtuosos of Wonderland croquet.”
― Arthur Koestler, The God that Failed

“Among other members of our cell I remember Dr. Wilhelm Reich, Founder and Director of the Sex-Pol. (Institute for Sexual Politics). He was a Freudian Marxist; inspired by Malinowski, he had just published a book called 'The Function of the Orgasm,' in which he expounded the theory that the sexual frustration of the Proletariat caused a thwarting of its political consciousness; only through a full, uninhibited release of the sexual urge could the working-class realize its revolutionary potentialities and historic mission; the whole thing was less cock-eyed than it sounds.”
― Arthur Koestler, The God that Failed

“For the intellectual, material comforts are relatively unimportant.”
― Richard Crossman, The God that Failed

“But no one who has not wrestled with Communism as a philosophy, and Communists as political opponents, can really understand the values of Western democracy. The Devil once lived in Heaven, and those who have not met him are unlikely to recognize an angel when they see one.”
― Richard Crossman, The God that Failed

“With relentless selectivity, the Communist machine has winnowed out the grain and retained only the chaff of Western culture.”
― Richard Crossman, The God that Failed

“The Communist novice, subjecting his soul to the canon law of the Kremlin, felt something of the release which Catholicism also brings to the intellectual, wearied and worried by the privilege of freedom.”
― Richard Crossman, The God that Failed

“The objectivity we sought was the power to recollect — if not in tranquillity, at least in 'dispassion' and this power is rarely granted except to the imaginative writer.”
― Richard Crossman, The God that Failed