Darkness at Noon

by Arthur Koestler

The evidence was contradictory and in the end our justification was a question of faith—the axiomatic faith in the correctness of our own deductions. That is the crucial point. We have thrown all ballast overboard and are secured by a single anchor chain—the belief in ourselves.

It also happened very often that someone would protest a presumably wrong interpretation of what he had just said, and with a distraught “I didn’t say that” or “I didn’t mean that” would call on his neighbors to back him up. The whole thing struck Rubashov as a bizarrely serious puppet theater, where roles were divvied up among marionettes that were controlled by wires and recited officially approved texts.