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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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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
People
Wildness
Unbelievable
Lived
Heard
Freedom
Read
Times
Stuff
Disorganized

More quotes by 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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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
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And everyone must lose his mind, everyone must! The sooner the better! It is essential — I know it.
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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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
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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
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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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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)
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The world is kept alive only by heretics.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The ancient God created the old man, capable of erring - thus he erred himself.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The highly complex, almost mathematical, nature of music creates for it an ironclad protection against the microbes of dilletantism, which penetrate much more easily into the fields of painting, literature, and the theater.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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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
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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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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
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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
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Philosophers of genius, children, and the people are equally wise - because they ask equally foolish questions. Foolish to a civilized man who has a well-furnished European apartment with an excellent toilet and a well-furnished dogma.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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They do not need the sun. Who needs the sun when the eyes glow? Darkness. A woolen fog has wrapped the earth, has dropped a heavy curtain. From far away, from beyond the curtain, comes the sound of drops falling on stone. Far, far away - the autumn, people, tomorrow. (The North)
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.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Accentuated plainness and accentuated vice ought to bring about harmony. Beauty lies in harmony, in style, whether it be the harmony of ugliness or beauty, vice or virtue.
Yevgeny Zamyatin