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Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

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Yevgeny Zamyatin
Age: 53 †
Born: 1884
Born: January 1
Died: 1937
Died: January 1
Author
Engineer
Librettist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Playwright
Prosaist
Satirist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin
Eugene Zamyatin
Two
Paradise
Without
Third
Thirds
Choice
Choices
Happiness
Freedom
Alternative
Given
Alternatives

More quotes by Yevgeny Zamyatin

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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
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The microspeed of the tongue ought to be always slightly less than the microspeed of the thoughts and certainly not ever the reverse.
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It has never occurred to me before, but this is truly how it is: all of us on earth walk constantly over a seething, scarlet sea of flame, hidden below, in the belly of the earth. We never think of it. But what if the thin crust under our feet should turn into glass and we should suddenly see?
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The next stage of development, perhaps in the distant future, will be a social order under which there will be no need for the coercive power of the state.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past today the rule is brevity - but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons... we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless Why? and What next?.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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All women are lips, nothing but lips.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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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
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I prefer being wrong in my own way to being right in someone else's.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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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
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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.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The purpose of art ... is not to reflect life but to organize it, to build it.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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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
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Now I no longer live in our clear, rational world I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox—the single most worthy path of the fearless mind . . . .
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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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