If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth. - Yevgeny Zamyatin
It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment. - Yevgeny Zamyatin
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
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
A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't even be worth reading. - Yevgeny Zamyatin
Children are the only bold philosophers. And bold philosophers will always be children. So you're right, it's a child's question, just as it should be. - Yevgeny Zamyatin
Everything used to revolve around the sun; now I knew it all revolved around me – slowly, blissfully, squinting its eyes. - Yevgeny Zamyatin
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
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
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
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
The government (or humanity) would not permit capital punishment for one man, but they permitted the murder of millions a little at a time. - Yevgeny Zamyatin
The speed of her tongue is not correctly calculated; the speed per second of her tongue should be slightly less than the speed per second of her thoughts – at any rate not the reverse. - Yevgeny Zamyatin
The whole world is one immense woman, and we are in her very womb, we are not yet born, we are joyfully ripening. - Yevgeny Zamyatin
Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative... - Yevgeny Zamyatin
What is strangest of all, most unnatural of all, is that the finger hasn't got the slightest desire to be on the hand, to be with the others. - Yevgeny Zamyatin
You are afraid of it because it is stronger than you; you hate it because you are afraid of it; you love it because you cannot subdue it to your will. Only the unsubduable can be loved. - Yevgeny Zamyatin