More Quotes by Yevgeny Zamyatin
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.
There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.
Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought.
Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.
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?
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.
The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.
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.
If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.
Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.
