More Quotes by Yevgeny Zamyatin
True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.
I prefer being wrong in my own way to being right in someone else's.
We need writers who fear nothing. ("Our Goal")
If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.
The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.
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.
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.
Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith.
A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth reading.
All truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today's truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number. This truth (the only one) is for the strong alone. Weak-nerved minds insist on a finite universe, a last number; they need, in Nietzsche's words, "the crutches of certainty". The weak-nerved lack the strength to include themselves in the dialectic syllogism.
