- Interrogator: You must confess your guilt. As an obedient member of the party, you must submit.
- A.L.: If I am not a good communist, but a Trotskyist spy, why appeal to my loyalty? If I'm a good communist, why am I here?
- A.L.: [on hearing that a traitor was discovered in the Party] I hope the tree isn't hiding the forest.
- Prison Guard: Let's hear you! What are your requests and complaints?
- A.L.: I want to see a party official.
- Prison Guard: Identify yourself!
- A.L.: Undersecretary of...
- Prison Guard: You're nobody! What's your number? Number! You're 3325. We'll be back when you know that. Walk!
- Interrogator: You're here to confess your crimes. You must confess.
- A.L.: Confess what? Who are you?
- Interrogator: Date - February 1. Confess. Admit who you are.
- A.L.: I'm the Undersecretary of Foreign...
- Interrogator: You're a number. What is it? Your number?
- A.L.: 3225. What am I accused of?
- Interrogator: You know very well. There's a name for men like you. What's your name?
- A.L.: The party knows my...
- Interrogator: Don't involve the party. Never invoke the party. You're here to confess, and you will.
- A.L.: I want to see an official...
- Interrogator: Confess!
- A.L.: Confess what?
- Interrogator: Confess!
- A.L.: You're not the Central Committee.
- Interrogator: We're above the Central Committee. Our task is to unmask traitors even within the Committee! We represent the power of the proletariat.
- A.L.: A quotation haunted me, "The individual becomes guilty not because he is guilty, but because he may be thought so."
- A.L.: But in Spain, in 1937, they were Yugoslav communists, not Titoists.
- Interrogator: An ex-undersecretary too. You don't know the ABCs of dialectics. The past must be judged in the light of truths established today
- A.L.: They're going to hang me. They'll make me disappear, like Wagner is Moscow. They will say I commited suicide for having too many regrets.
- Zavodsky, Head of Security: We haven't found the enemy in our ranks. We knew that death and betrayal were inseparable from revolution. It's our turn to experience betrayal and death so that the revolution may continue. That's what's important - that it continue, even if we are destroyed.
- A.L.: My father was the fifth of eight children, son of a railroad man in Moravia under Austro-Hungarian rule. Then he went to Switzerland and in about 1900 emigrated to America. He learned English very quickly. He could recite Whitman poems by heart and pages of Paine and Jefferson. In New York he met my mother, also an emigre. They came back home together. In the First World War, he was a stretcher bearer. Through contact with Russian prisoners, he learned about Bolshevism. From him I first heard of Rosa Luxemburg, the Spartacists, Lenin, the Commune of Canton. It was he who made me read Heinrich Heine. He pointed my way into the Communist Youth.
- Kohoutek: What happened to us? Do you understand it at all?
- Prison Guard: [Repeated line] Walk!
- Interrogator: Here we uproot weeds before they spread.
- Interrogator: Admit it! Admit you're a Trotskyist! Admit it!
- Public Prosecutor: I accuse them as traitors, Trotskyists, Titoists, Zionists, and enemies of the people of conspiring in the service of the American imperialists and under the leadership of Western intelligence agencies to break our alliance with the Soviet Union, to overthrow the regime and to restore capitalism by impeding socialists construction.
- Lise: But why should he confess, a man like him?
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