Yevgeny Zamyatin Quotes

True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.

Individual consciousness is just sickness.

It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.

You're in bad shape. It looks like you're developing a soul.

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.

Explosions are not comfortable.

Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought.

If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.

We have lived through the epoch of suppression of the masses; we are living in an epoch of suppression of the individual in the name of the masses; tomorrow will bring the liberation of the individual - in the name of man.

There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.

Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.

I prefer being wrong in my own way to being right in someone else's.

There are books of the same chemical composition as dynamite. The only difference is that a piece of dynamite explodes once, whereas a book explodes a thousand times.

Children are the boldest philosophers. They enter life naked, not covered by the smallest fig leaf of dogma, absolutes, creeds. This is why every question they ask is so absurdly naïve and so frighteningly complex.

Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken - errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs.

There is an excellent way to make predictions without the slightest risk of error: predict the past.

Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.

Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith.

Knowledge! What does that mean? Your knowledge is nothing but cowardice. No, really, that's all it is. You just want to put a little wall around infinity. And you're afraid to look on the other side of that wall.

All truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today's truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number. This truth (the only one) is for the strong alone. Weak-nerved minds insist on a finite universe, a last number; they need, in Nietzsche's words, "the crutches of certainty". The weak-nerved lack the strength to include themselves in the dialectic syllogism.

A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth reading.

You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.

The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.

I am aware of myself. And, of course, the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth might as well not even be there. Isn't it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness?

All truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today's truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number.