More Quotes by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.
Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith.
Explosions are not comfortable.
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.
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.
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.
Crossing out is an art that is, perhaps, even more difficult than writing. It requires the sharpest eye to decide what is superfluous and must be removed. And it requires ruthlessness toward yourself -- the greatest ruthlessness and self-sacrifice. You must know how to sacrifice parts in the name of the whole.
The most agonising thing is to drop doubt into a man about his being a reality, three-dimensional - and not some other kind of reality.
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.
Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.
