Top 120 Yevgeny Zamyatin Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

2. “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.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

4. “We comes from God, I from the Devil.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

5. “Love and hunger rule the world. Ergo, to rule the world, one must master love and hunger.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

7. “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.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

8. “Here I saw, with my own eyes, that laughter was the most terrible weapon: you can kill anything with laughter – even murder itself.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

9. “Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

10. “I prefer being wrong in my own way to being right in someone else’s.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

11. “We appeal, not to those who reject today in the name of a return to yesterday, not to those who are hopelessly deafened by today; we appeal to those who see the distant tomorrow – and judge today in the name of tomorrow.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

12. “And everyone must lose his mind, everyone must! The sooner the better! It is essential – I know it.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

13. “Her smile was a bite, and I was its target.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

14. “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.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

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15. “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?”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

17. “The world is kept alive only by heretics.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

18. “What makes you think that nonsense is bad? If they’d nurtured and cared for human nonsense over the ages the way they did intelligence, it might have turned into something of special value.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

19. “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.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

20. “It is not possible to build on negative emotions. Genuine literature will come only when we replace hatred for man with love for man.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

21. “Happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

22. “At night numbers must sleep; it is their duty, just as it is their duty to work in the daytime. Not sleeping at night is a criminal offense.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

23. “There were two in paradise and the choice was offered to them: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. No other choice. Tertium non datur. They, fools that they were, chose freedom.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

24. “Don’t forget that we lawyers, we’re a higher breed of intellect, and so it’s our privilege to lie. It’s as clear as day. Animals can’t even imagine lying: if you were to find yourself among some wild islanders, they too would only speak the truth until they learned about European culture.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

25. “And tomorrow – who knows what happens? Do you get it? I don’t know and no one knows – it’s all unknown! You understand, that this is the end to the Known? This is the new, the improbable, the unpredictable.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

26. “Is it not clear, however, that bliss and envy are the numerator and denominator of the fraction called happiness?”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

27. “Sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

28. “Only lifeless mechanisms move along faultlessly straight lines and compass circles. In art the surest way to destroy is to canonize one given form and one philosophy: that which is canonized quickly dies of obesity, of entropy.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

29. “You will place the benevolent yoke of reason on the necks of the unknown beings on other planets, who may still be living in that primitive state known as freedom.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

31. “And why do you think that foolishness is bad? If human foolishness had been as carefully nurtured and cultivated as intelligence has been for centuries, perhaps it would have turned into something extremely precious.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

32. “What is it to you if I don’t want others to want for me, if I want to want myself – if I want the impossible...”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

33. “Literature is painting, architecture, and music.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

34. “The mighty power of logic cleanses all it touches.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

35. “The most wonderful thing in life is to be delirious and the most wonderful kind of delirium is being in love.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

36. “It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this “once in a thousand years” has come today.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

37. “How do you know that nonsense isn’t a good thing? If human nonsense had been nurtured and developed for centuries, just as intelligence has, then perhaps something extraordinarily precious could have come from it.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

38. “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.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

39. “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.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

40. “All women are lips, nothing but lips.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

41. “I’m like a machine being run over its RPM limit. The bearings are overheating: a minute longer and the metal will melt and start dripping and that will be the end of everything. I need a splash of cold water, logic; I pour it on in buckets but the logic hisses on the hot bearings and dissipates in the air as a fleeting white mist.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

42. “There is no joy nobler than suffering for the sake of love for man.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

43. “I’ve read and heard a lot of unbelievable stuff about those times when people lived in freedom – that is, in disorganized wildness.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

44. “Individual consciousness is just sickness.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

45. “Who knows who you really are? A person is like a novel: Up to the very last page you don’t know how it’s going to end. Otherwise, there’d be no point in reading...”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

46. “All their Immanuel Kants together couldn’t do it! It didn’t enter the heads of all their Kants to build a system of scientific ethics, that is, ethics based on adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

47. “They say there is a kind of flower that blooms only once a century, Then couldn’t there be one that flowers only once every thousand years – or once every ten thousand years? Maybe there are and we just don’t know it because today is itself that once-in-a-thousand-year moment.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

48. “Everyone has to go mad, it’s essential fir everyone to go mad – as soon as possible! It’s essential – I know.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

49. “Even among the ancients, the most mature among them knew that the source of right is might; that right is a function of power. And so, we have the scales: on one side, a grain, on the other a ton; on one side “I,” on the other “We,” the One State. Is it not clear, then, that to assume that the “I” can have some “rights” in relation to the State is exactly like assuming that a gram can balance the scale against the ton? Hence, the division: rights to the ton, duties to the gram.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

50. “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.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin