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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
Times
Stuff
Disorganized
People
Wildness
Unbelievable
Lived
Heard
Freedom
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More quotes by 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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If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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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
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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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The inner world: those spiritual apartments to which we are reluctant to admit strangers.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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We comes from God, I from the Devil.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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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?
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Every genuine poet is necessarily a Columbus. America existed for centuries before Columbus but it was only Columbus who was able to track it down.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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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
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Sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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And a question stirred within me: What if he, this yellow-eyed creature, in his disorderly, filthy mound of leaves, in his uncomputed life, is happier than we are?
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Dogma, static positions, consonance - all these are obstacles to catching the disease of art, at least in its more complex forms.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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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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What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturabtion … whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.
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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There is an excellent way to make predictions without the slightest risk of error: predict the past.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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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
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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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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