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Children are the boldest philosophers. They enter life naked, not covered by the smallest fig leaf of dogma, absolutes, creeds. This is why every question they ask is so absurdly naïve and so frighteningly complex.

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
Children
Complexes
Leafs
Every
Complex
Leaf
Life
Philosopher
Philosophers
Absolutes
Dogma
Naked
Creeds
Frighteningly
Question
Smallest
Boldest
Philosophy
Covered
Absurdly
Asks
Enter
Figs

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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.
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By complex ways, by looking deep into the dark well of the human soul, full of filth, somewhere at the very bottom of it Chekhov at last found his faith. And this faith turned out to be faith in man, in the power of human progress. And man became his god.
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To reflect the entire spectrum, the dynamics of the adventure novel must be invested with a philosophic synthesis of one kind or another.
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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.
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And everyone must lose his mind, everyone must! The sooner the better! It is essential — I know it.
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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...
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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”)
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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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At night numbers must sleep it is their duty, just as it is their duty to work in the daytime. Not sleeping at night is a criminal offense.
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And tomorrow--who knows what happens? Do you get it? I don't know and no one knows--it's all unknown! You understand, that this is the end to the Known? This is the new, the improbable, the unpredictable.
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.
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Is it not clear, however, that bliss and envy are the numerator and denominator of the fraction called happiness?
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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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
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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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We appeal, not to those who reject today in the name of a return to yesterday, not to those who are hopelessly deafened by today we appeal to those who see the distant tomorrow -- and judge today in the name of tomorrow.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Love and hunger rule the world. Ergo, to rule the world, one must master love and hunger.
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