YEVGENY ZAMYATIN

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

Explosions are not comfortable.

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.

I've read and heard a lot of unbelievable stuff about those times when people lived in freedom -- that is, in disorganized wildness.

And happiness...Well, after all, desires torment us, don't they? And, clearly, happiness is when there are no more desires, not one...What a mistake, what ridiculous prejudice it's been to have marked happiness always with a plus sign. Absolute happiness should, of course, carry a minus sign — the divine minus.

There is an excellent way to make predictions without the slightest risk of error: predict the past.

To reflect the entire spectrum, the dynamics of the adventure novel must be invested with a philosophic synthesis of one kind or another.

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.

We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")

In order to write about the machine you have to know it, to live with it, to love it (or hate it). I think that true writing could be done on industrial subjects by people who work in industry, who are firmly linked with it. But ... and here is the opposite 'but', the technology of literary craftsmanship is itself a very fine and complex matter. Qualified specialists from industry prove themselves dilettantes in the field of literature. The needed synthesis is not yet in sight.

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

She moved nearer, leaned her shoulder against me — and we were one, and something flowed from her into me, and I knew: this is how it must be. I knew it with every nerve, and every hair, every heartbeat, so sweet it verged on pain. And what joy to submit to this 'must'. A piece of iron must feel such joy as it submits to the precise, inevitable law that draws it to a magnet. Or a stone, thrown up, hesitating a moment, then plunging headlong back to earth. Or a man, after the final agony, taking a last deep breath — and dying.

And everyone must lose his mind, everyone must! The sooner the better! It is essential — I know it.

The lilac branches are bowed under the weight of the flowers: blooming is hard, and the most important thing is - to bloom. (“A Story About The Most Important Thing”)

The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.

But you can't plead with autumn. No. The midnight wind stalked through the woods, hooted to frighten you, swept everything away for the approaching winter, whirled the leaves. ("The North")

The knife is the most permanent, the most immortal, the most ingenious of man's creations. The knife was a guillotine; the knife is a universal means of resolving all knots.

I am like a machine being driven to excessive rotations: the bearings are incandescing and, in a minute, melted metal will begin to drip and everything will turn to nothing. Quick: get cold water, logic. I am pouring it over myself by the bucketload but the logic sizzles on the hot bearings and dissipates elusive white steam into the air.

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.

Revolution is everywhere, in everything. There is no final revolution, no final number.

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.

The ancient God created the old man, capable of erring - thus he erred himself.

O, mighty, divinely delimited wisdom of walls, boundaries! I is perhaps the most magnificent of all inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he build the first wall. Men ceased to be a wild man only when we built the Green Wall, only when, by means of that wall, we isolated our perfect machine world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds, and animals.

The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.

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.