Kallocain Quotes
"The warrior feels pain from his wounds, the fallen warrior’s widow feels pain beneath her veil, even though her joy in serving the State compensates for this pain many times."
"If you use the words ‘in march-time’, it gives you some idea. The determined comportment, the clear and measured manner of speaking that were the only natural and worthy attributes of a full-grown fellow soldier, were not at Rissen’s disposal."
"There are few things that say more about a person than their image of life: whether they see it as a road, a battlefield, a growing tree or a rolling sea."
"No one can have so much respect and so much self-respect that they do not want more."
"It was therefore with a dash of fever in my blood that I returned from the short telephone call informing me that I might expect my control chief to arrive the following day."
"All human beings want to be forced open like tin cans, want to open themselves."
"No one could think them anything but well-motivated: what hotbeds of espionage and conspiracy the parents’ rooms might otherwise become, especially if they were also used as guest rooms!"
"Everyone needs a now, you know, not just a vanished moment that you must live on for the rest of your life."
"I had the impression that she barely saw me. She was truly peculiar."
"It was as if I had taken leave of my senses and babbled things I didn’t mean at all."
"No one could love their job more than I do, and quitting is naturally the last thing on my mind."
"The person of whom no one needs to be afraid can demand no respect."
"Strength, superiority, and power are always dangerous to those around them."
"The collective stands ready to conquer the last area where asocial tendencies could previously take refuge."
"From individualism to collectivism – from isolation to community."
"If one prefers the struggle of all against all to the well-organized State, then life in the Stone Age must have been very agreeable."
"The destiny of the World State may hang in the balance – and you ask about the rules and regulations!"
"We’ve been moving towards ever stricter surveillance – and it hasn’t made us safer, as we hoped, but more fearful."
"Everything is possible if one has the right judge."
"The sacred and necessary foundation of the State’s existence is our mutual well-founded mistrust of each other."
"No, no, and no. We realize and approve that the State is everything, the individual nothing."
"The State has more use for clear heads that can despise printer’s ink when necessary."
"I hate you because you can’t rescue me from this, I would have killed you if I hadn’t been afraid."
"How can it be, that we search for something that doesn’t exist?"
"I have loved you too much, Leo, and so you weren’t there, either."
"The fear that usually awoke at certain times of crisis in one’s life was rendered more acute in the face of rapid choice and drove the person in the right direction."
"I was sick, unstrung to the roots of my being, because she had held herself like a mirror in front of me."
"I knew nothing except what she told me, I disappeared in it, was her."
"She must have understood. She put her hand on my head. We remained in that position for a long, long time."
"But it’s not enough. Afterwards I realized that either I must die of shame, or I must go on voluntarily."
"It wasn’t that. But I struggled with doubt that it would really be possible to get very far with such a war of extermination."
"I wanted to break everything and make everything new. There was no world for me any more, no place to dwell in."
"She was Maryl. She wasn’t like anyone else. She wasn’t a shapeless lump of clay."
"I knew that what I am is on the way somewhere."
"I cannot, I cannot eradicate from my soul the illusion that still, in spite of everything, I am taking part in the creation of a new world."