242 Quotes by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Freedom and crime are linked as indivisibly as... well, as the motion of the aero and its speed: when its speed equals zero, it does not move; when man’s freedom equals zero, he commits no crimes. That is clear. The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.

The knife is the most durable, immortal, the most genius thing that man created. The knife was the guillotine; the knife is the universal means of solving all knots; and along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox – the single most worthy path of the fearless mind.

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.

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

Who knows who you are... A person is a novel: you don’t know how it will end until the very last page. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be worth reading to the very end...

When we remove the snowdrift piled up over Chekhov in recent years, we uncover a man profoundly agitated by social problems; a writer whose social ideals are the same as those we live by; a philosophy of the divinity of man, of fervent faith in man – the faith that moves mountains.

Philosophers of genius, children, and the people are equally wise – because they ask equally foolish questions. Foolish to a civilized man who has a well-furnished European apartment, with an excellent toilet, and a well-furnished dogma.

Was it not I who populated with them all these pages – just recently no more than white rectangular deserts? Without me, would they ever be seen by those whom I shall lead behind me along the narrow paths of lines?

The speed of her tongue is not correctly calculated; the speed per second of her toungue should be slightly less than the speed per second of her thoughts -at any rate not the reverse.