More Quotes by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Explosions are not comfortable.
You're in bad shape. It looks like you're developing a soul.
Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.
I prefer being wrong in my own way to being right in someone else's.
We need writers who fear nothing. ("Our Goal")
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.
True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.
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.
Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.
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.
