Yevgeny Zamiatin - Collected Quotes

"All truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today’s truths become errors tomorrow." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters", 1923)

"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 naive and so frighteningly complex." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters", 1923) 

"Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters", 1923)

"No revolution, no heresy is comfortable or easy. For it is a leap, it is a break in the smooth evolutionary curve, and a break is a wound, a pain. But the wound is necessary; most of mankind suffers from hereditary sleeping sickness, and victims of this sickness (entropy) must not be allowed to sleep, or it will be their final sleep, death."  (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters", 1923)

"Revolution is everywhere, in everything. It is infinite. There is no final revolution, no final number. The social revolution is only one of an infinite number of numbers; the law of revolution is not a social law, but an immeasurably greater one. It is a cosmic, universal law - like the laws of the conservation of energy and of the dissipation of energy (entropy)." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters", 1923)

"A human being is like a novel: until the last page you don’t know how it will

end. Or it wouldn’t be worth reading [...]" (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"A true physician begins his cure with a healthy man." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"All unknowns are organically inimical to man, and homo sapiens is human in the full sense of the word only when his grammar is entirely free of question marks." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"Dreams are a serious psychic disease." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924) 

"Everyone must lose his mind, everyone must! The sooner the better! It is essential."(Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)  

"Everything in human society is being continually perfected - and should be." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"Human heads are opaque, with only tiny windows in them - the eyes." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"I wondered at the ancients who had never realized the utter absurdity of their literature and poetry. The enormous, magnificent power of the literary word was completely wasted. It’s simply ridiculous - everyone wrote anything he pleased." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"Laughter can be of different colors. It is only an echo of a distant explosion within you. It may be festive - red, blue, and golden fireworks; or - torn fragments of a human body flying up..." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"Neither mathematics nor death ever makes a mistake." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"Oh, great, divinely bounding wisdom of walls and barriers! They are, perhaps, the greatest of man’s inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he built the first wall." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924) 

"Only the rational and useful is beautiful." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924) 

"The cruelest thing is to make a person doubt his own reality." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"The entire history of mankind, insofar as we know it, is the history of transition from nomadic to increasingly settled forms of existence. And does it not follow that the most settled form (ours) is at the same time the most perfect (ours)?" (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"The function of man’s highest faculty, his reason, consists precisely of the continuous limitation of infinity, the breaking up of infinity into convenient, easily digestible portions - differentials. This is precisely what lends my field, mathematics, its divine beauty." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"The inevitable mark of truth is - its cruelty." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"The knife is the strongest, the most immortal, the most brilliant of man’s creations. The knife has been a guillotine; the knife is the universal means of solving all knots." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924) 

"This is entirely unlike the disorderly, disorganized elections of the ancients, when - absurd to say - the very results of the election were unknown beforehand. Building a state on entirely unpredictable eventualities, blindly - what can be more senseless?" (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative. Those idiots chose freedom, and what came of it? Of course, for ages afterward they longed for the chains. The chains - you understand? That’s what world sorrow was about." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"'We' is from God, and 'I' from the devil." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"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 Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"You love it because you cannot subdue it to your will. Only the unsubduable can be loved." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924) 

"You will subjugate the unknown beings on other planets, who may still be living in the primitive condition of freedom, to the beneficial yoke of reason. If they fail to understand that we bring them mathematically infallible happiness, it will be our duty to compel them to be happy." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)