Aging & Wisdom Quote by Arthur Koestler

Koestler’s line doesn’t flatter politics; it indicts our comforting idea that morality is the default setting. “Breathing spaces of history” is the tell: democracy and decency are framed as luxuries that appear when the pressure drops, when the big decisions have already been made, when institutions can afford to act like principles, not triage. Then comes the hard pivot: “critical turning points,” where the normal rules collapse and the oldest, ugliest maxim returns as if it were gravity.

The sentence works because it performs the very move it describes. It starts with a conditional hope - “relatively fair” - and then narrows the aperture until only necessity remains. “Relatively” is doing cynical work: even in calm periods, fairness is partial, contingent, often cosmetic. At the brink, Koestler suggests, political actors will reach for coercion, deception, even violence, and then dress it up as inevitability.

Context matters: Koestler’s life ran through the 20th century’s ideological meat grinder. A onetime communist who became a ferocious critic of totalitarian logic (especially Stalinism), he understood how “turning points” are narrated after the fact to absolve brutality. The subtext isn’t just that emergencies tempt leaders; it’s that leaders manufacture emergencies to claim emergency permission. The quote dares the reader to ask a brutal question: if history is always declaring a “critical moment,” when do we ever get the breathing space - and who decides we’re in it?