Darkness at Noon

by Arthur Koestler

It was their resulting psychological collapse that Koestler wished to explore, rather than the mechanisms of the trials themselves.

its basic message is still relevant, and that current dictatorships operate in essentially the same way they always have—by terrorizing their subjects and depriving them of their most important freedoms.

Rubashov is an archetypal political prisoner, a flawed everyman in search of salvation. Darkness at Noon’s message remains topical but also timeless, a warning to readers that is not to be ignored.

Richard sat up straight but stayed on the sofa. In the dim light of the room Rubashov could barely make out the bulging, bloodshot eyes, and yet it was this image—the seated figure with the blurred outlines—that was forever etched in his memory.

Rubashov wondered what other surprises his brain held in store for him. He knew from experience that every confrontation with death changed the mechanism of thinking and triggered the most surprising reactions—like the needle of a compass close to the magnetic pole.

The movement had no interest in individual reasons, motives, or morals: it was indifferent to what went on in any one person’s head and heart.

In other words”—Rubashov paused to put his pince-nez back on—“back then we were making history, today you are practicing politics. That is the whole difference.”

When the existence of the Church is threatened, she is released from the commandments of morality. With unity as the end, the use of every means is sanctified, even deceit, treachery, violence, usury, prison, and death. Because order serves the good of the community, the individual must be sacrificed for the common good. Ludwig von Pastor, History of the Popes, from the Close of the Middle Ages, after Dietrich von Nieheim in De modis uniendiae reformandi ecclesiam, 1410

Politics can be fair when history pauses to catch its breath, but at critical turning points there is no other standard than the old proposition that the end justifies the means. We were the ones who introduced neo-Machiavellianism into this century; the others, the counterrevolutionary dictators, offered crude imitations. Our neo-Machiavellianism was on behalf of cosmopolitan reason—that was our greatness; theirs is in the name of a limited, nationalistic romanticism—that is their anachronism. Therefore in the end we will be absolved by history, and they will not . . .

He could only focus his thoughts by writing them down, but the act of writing was exhausting; at most he could force himself to do it for one or two hours. The rest of the time his mind was working on its own.

He couldn’t shake the painful feeling of guilt, and the annoying toothache came back. That was her last visit.

You know how members of our race are pathologically inclined to weep and wail, especially over their own fate. Our greatest poets drank that poison and that was what led to their ruin. Until the age of forty or fifty they were revolutionaries—then they became intoxicated, addicted to pity, and the world proclaimed them saints. You seem to have the same ambition and you’re convinced your case is unique, that no one else has ever gone through the same process . . .”

The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only useful standard of political morality; everything else is cheap literature, vague prattle that slips between your fingers. But the principle only holds true when the action serves a useful collective purpose and not merely an individual goal. If Raskolnikov had dispatched the old woman on assignment from the party, for instance to enrich a strike fund or enable an illegal print shop, then the calculation would add up, and the novel, with its misleading presentation of the problem, would never have been written, to the benefit of humanity.”

our administrative officials mercilessly destroy their subordinates because they know they must account for their actions and otherwise will be destroyed themselves;

Because what we are facing is clearly a pendulum swing of history, from absolutism to democracy, from democracy to absolute dictatorship.

Instinctively, Number One probably understood the law of relative maturity of the masses better than anyone else. Amateur tyrants had forced their subjects to act on command; Number One had taught them to think on command.

If history was a mathematical calculation, then what was the weight of two thousand nightmares, the two-thousandfold pressure of their impotent desires?

One had to burn out the last vestige of vanity, and what was suicide but an inverted form of vanity?

But what did these Neanderthals know what for him was truly decisive, what mattered most, what he considered truth, measured by his own standards?

but the words “You belong to this tough type” that occupied his thoughts. Against his will this sentence filled him with a pleasant sense of satisfaction.

But the leader of our movement recognized that everything boiled down to this one point: having the longer endurance in the face of history and making sure that the others perished but not us.”

“They want to choke the republic in blood. How much longer should the footprints of liberty be graves? Behold the dictatorship—it has torn off its veil and carries its head high as it tramples our dead bodies.”

The definition of the individual was: a mass of one million divided by one million.

Perhaps thinking everything through to the end was not a healthy thing to do.

Perhaps they will disprove the theorem that a human being is the quotient of one million divided by one million and introduce a new arithmetic, based on multiplication: on the merger of millions of Is to form a new unity that is no longer an amorphous mass but maintains its I-character, the oceanic feeling reinforced a millionfold, within a universe that was boundless and yet closed within itself . . .

wave gently lifted him up. It came from afar and traveled serenely onward, a shrug of infinity.

“If you must die, what are you dying for?” an absolutely black vacuity suddenly rises before you with startling vividness.