More Quotes by Yevgeny Zamyatin
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.
Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought.
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.
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.
