& Alan Turing: Are you paying attention?
& Detective Nock: I think Alan Turing’s hiding something...
& Commander Denniston: Are you a bleeding pacifist?
Alan Turing: I’m... agnostic about violence.
& Commander Denniston: How old are you, Mr. Turing?
Alan Turing: Uh, 27.
Commander Denniston: And how old were you when you became a Fellow at Cambridge?
Alan Turing: 24.
Commander Denniston: And how old were you when you published this paper that has a title I can barely understand?
Alan Turing: Uh, 23.
Commander Denniston: And you don’t think that qualifies you as a certified prodigy?
Alan Turing: Well, Newton discovered binomial theorem aged 22. Einstein wrote four papers that changed the world by the age of 26. As far as I can tell, I’ve... I’ve barely made par.
Commander Denniston: My God, you’re serious.
Alan Turing: Would you prefer I made a joke?
Commander Denniston: Oh, I don’t think you know what those are.
& Alan Turing: Five rotors. Ten plugboard cables. That’s...
Jack Good: One million...
John Cairncross: A thousand million...
Peter Hilton: It’s million, million. It’s in the millions, obviously.
Alan Turing: It’s over 150 million million million possible settings.
Commander Denniston: Very good.
Hugh Alexander: 159. If you want to be exact about it. 1-5-9 with 18 zeroes behind it. Possibilities. Every single day.
& Alan Turing: They were all floating through the air. Radio signals that... well, any schoolboy with an AM kit could intercept. The trick was that they were encrypted. There were 159 million million million possible Enigma settings. All we had to do was try each one.
& Alan Turing: But if we had ten men checking one setting a minute for 24 hours every day and seven days every week, how many days do you think it would take to, uh, to check each of the settings?.. Well, it’s not days, it’s years. It’s 20 million years. To stop a coming attack, we would have to check 20 million years’ worth of settings in 20 minutes.
& Commander Denniston: Have you ever won a war, Turing?.. I have. Do you know how it’s done? Order, discipline, chain of command. You’re not at university any longer.
You are a very small cog in a very large system. And you will do as your commanding officer instructs.
Alan Turing: Who-who is your commanding officer?
Commander Denniston: .... Winston Churchill, Number 10 Downing Street, London, SW1.
& Stewart Menzies: Popular at school, were you?
Alan Turing: ... The problem began, of course, with the carrots. Carrots are orange. And peas are green. They mustn’t touch.
& Alan Turing: Do you know why people like violence? It is because it feels... good. Humans find violence deeply satisfying. But remove the-the satisfaction, and the act becomes... hollow.
& Christopher Morcom: You know, Alan,
sometimes it’s the very people who no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine.
& Stewart Menzies: My warmest welcome to His Majesty’s service. If you speak a word of what I’m about to show you, you will be executed for high treason. You will lie to your friends, your family and everyone you meet about what it is you really do.
Joan Clarke: And... what is it that we’re really doing?
Alan Turing: We’re going to break an unbreakable Nazi code and win the war.
& Joan Clarke: But-but, Mr. Turing... why are you helping me?
Alan Turing: Oh. Um... sometimes it’s the very people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.
& Hugh Alexander: ...If you run the wires across the plugboard matrix diagonally, it will eliminate rotor positions 500 times faster.
Alan Turing: That’s, uh... actually not an entirely terrible idea.
Joan Clarke: I think that was Alan for «thank you.»
& Alan Turing: I’m sitting in a police station, accused of entreating a young man to touch my penis and you just asked me if machines can think.
Detective Nock: Well, can they?
Alan Turing: Could machines ever think as human beings do? Most people say not.
Detective Nock: You’re not most people.
Alan Turing: Well, the problem is you’re... asking a stupid question.
Detective Nock: I am?
Alan Turing: Of course machines... can’t think as people do. A machine is different... from a person. Hence, they think differently. The interesting question is, just because something, uh, thinks differently from you, does that mean it’s not thinking?
Well, we allow for humans to have such divergences from one another. You like strawberries, I hate ice-skating, you... cry at sad films, I... am allergic to pollen. What is the point of-of different tastes, different... preferences if not to say that our brains work differently, that we think differently? And if we can say that about one another, then why can’t we say the same thing for brains... built of copper and wire, steel?..
Detective Nock: And that’s... this big paper you wrote? What’s it called?
Alan Turing: «The Imitation Game.»
Detective Nock: Right, that’s... that’s what it’s about?
& Alan Turing: Would you like to play?
Detective Nock: Play?
Alan Turing: It’s a game. A test of sorts. For determining whether something is a... a machine or a human being.
Detective Nock: How do I play?
Alan Turing: Well, there’s a judge and a subject, and... the judge asks questions, and, depending on the subject’s answers, determines who he is talking with... what he is talking with, and, um... All you have to do is ask me a question.
Detective Nock: What did you do during the war?
Alan Turing: I worked in a radio factory.
Detective Nock: What did you really do during the war?
Alan Turing: Are you paying attention?
& Alan Turing: Wh-Why do you think your German counterpart has a girlfriend?
Helen: It’s just a stupid joke; don’t worry.
Alan Turing: No, no, no, no. Tell me.
Helen: Well, each of his messages begins with the same five letters: C-I-L-L-Y. So I suspect that Cilly must be the name of his amore.
Joan Clarke: But that’s impossible! The Germans are instructed to use five random letters at the start of every message.
Helen: Well, this bloke doesn’t.
Alan Turing: Love will make a man do strange things, I suppose. In this case, love just lost Germany the whole bloody war.
& Alan Turing: Heil Hitler. Turns out that’s the only German you need to know to, uh, break Enigma.
& Alan Turing: You know why people like violence, Hugh? It’s because it feels good. Sometimes we can’t do what feels good. We have to do what is logical.
& Hugh Alexander: What’s logical?
Alan Turing: Hardest time to lie to somebody is when they’re expecting to be lied to... If someone’s waiting for a lie, you can’t just, uh, give them one.
& John Cairncross: There are 500 civilians in that convoy! Women... children. We’re about to let them die.
Alan Turing: Our job i-is not to save one passenger convoy, it is to win the war.
& Alan Turing: Our job was to crack Enigma. We’ve done that. Now for the hard part. Keeping it a secret.
& Peter Hilton: You’re not God, Alan— you don’t get to decide who lives and who dies.
Alan Turing: Yes, we do.
Peter Hilton: Why?
Alan Turing: Because no one else can.
& Alan Turing: ...You can take care of that. While we develop a system to help you determine how much intelligence to act on— which a-attacks to stop, which to let through. Statistical analysis. The minimal number of actions it would take for us to win the war... but the maximum number we can take before the Germans get suspicious.
Stewart Menzies: And you’re going to trust all this to statistics? To maths?
Alan Turing: Correct. And then you can leak those stories to the, uh, the Germans. And then to our own military.
Stewart Menzies: Maintain a conspiracy of lies at the highest levels of government. Sounds right up my alley.
& Alan Turing: Some advice about keeping secrets. It’s a lot easier if you don’t know them in the first place.
& Alan Turing: I... I’m not a spy. I’m... I’m just a mathematician.
Stewart Menzies: I know a lot of spies, Alan. You’ve got more secrets than the best of them.
& Stewart Menzies: Oh, Alan... we’re gonna have such a wonderful war together.
& Alan Turing: I’m... I’m a homosexual.
Joan Clarke: All right.
Alan Turing: No, no. M-Men, Joan... uh, not women.
Joan Clarke: So what?
Alan Turing: Well, I-I just told you.
Joan Clarke: So what? I had my suspicions; I always did. But we’re not like other people. We love each other in our own way, and we can have the life together that we want. You-you... you won’t be the perfect husband. Well, I can promise you, I have no intention of being the perfect wife. I’ll not be... fixing your lamb all day while you come home from the office. I’ll work. You’ll work. And we’ll have each other’s company. We’ll have each other’s minds. That sounds like a better marriage than most. Because I care for you. And you care for me. And we understand one another more than... more than anyone else ever has.
& Alan Turing: Was I God? No. Because... God didn’t win the war.
& Alan Turing: Now, Detective, you get to judge. So, tell me... what am I? Mm, am I... a machine? Am I a person? Am I a war hero? Am I a criminal?
Detective Nock: I can’t judge you.
Alan Turing: Well, then... you’re no help to me at all.
& Alan Turing: You-you got what you wanted, didn’t you? Work, a husband. Normal life...
Joan Clarke: No one normal could have done that.
& Joan Clarke: Do you know, this morning... I was on a train that went through a city that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for you. I bought a ticket from a man who would likely be dead if it wasn’t for you. I read up on my work... a whole field of scientific inquiry that only exists because of you. Now, if you wish you could have been normal... I can promise you I do not. The world is an infinitely better place precisely because you weren’t.
& Joan Clarke: I think... that sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.
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+ quotes on the IMDb
Σ Breathtaking mathematics.