“He had often looked at the colour-print of No. 1 hanging over his bed and tried to hate it. They had, between themselves, given him many names, but in the end it was No. 1 that stuck. The horror which No. 1 emanated, above all consisted in the possibility that he was in the right, and that all those whom he killed had to admit, even with the bullet in the backs of their necks, that he conceivably might be in the right. There was no certainty; only the appeal to that mocking oracle they called History, who gave her sentence only when the jaws of the appealer had long since fallen to dust.”

–Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon