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R-13
The Benefactor is the authoritarian dictator of the One State. The One State’s ciphers regard the Benefactor as a living God and live in great fear of his wrath. He preaches that happiness can only be achieved through the removal of desire and unpredictability. At the end of We, the Benefactor summons D-503 to his chambers and informs him that I-330 never truly loved him—she had only been using him to get to the Integral and set the revolution against the One State into motion.
The Benefactor Quotes in We
The We quotes below are all either spoken by The Benefactor or refer to The Benefactor. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Record 25
Quotes
What will tomorrow bring? What will I turn into tomorrow?
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Record 36
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“The most merciful Christian, God himself, slowly burning all the recalcitrants in the fires of Hell—is he not an executioner? And were there really fewer burned at the stake by the Christians than Christians who were burned themselves? And yet, understand this, and yet, they glorified this God as the God of Love. Absurd? No, the opposite: it is testimony, written in blood, to the ineradicable good sense of a human. Even then—wild, shaggy as they were—they understood: true algebraic love toward humankind is inhuman—and the sure sign of truth is its cruelty.”
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If only I had a mother like the Ancients: my—yes, exactly—my own mother. She would know me as—not the Builder of the Integral, and not cipher D-503, and not a molecule of the One State—but simply a fragment of humanity, a fragment of herself, trampled, squashed, thrown away…”
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Get the entire We LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Benefactor Quotes in We
The We quotes below are all either spoken by The Benefactor or refer to The Benefactor. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Record 25
Quotes
What will tomorrow bring? What will I turn into tomorrow?
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 36
Quotes
“The most merciful Christian, God himself, slowly burning all the recalcitrants in the fires of Hell—is he not an executioner? And were there really fewer burned at the stake by the Christians than Christians who were burned themselves? And yet, understand this, and yet, they glorified this God as the God of Love. Absurd? No, the opposite: it is testimony, written in blood, to the ineradicable good sense of a human. Even then—wild, shaggy as they were—they understood: true algebraic love toward humankind is inhuman—and the sure sign of truth is its cruelty.”
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
If only I had a mother like the Ancients: my—yes, exactly—my own mother. She would know me as—not the Builder of the Integral, and not cipher D-503, and not a molecule of the One State—but simply a fragment of humanity, a fragment of herself, trampled, squashed, thrown away…”
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Explanation and Analysis:
