Yevgeny Zamyatin
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin/ February 1, 1884 – March 10, 1937) was a Russian author of science fiction and political satire. He is most famous for his 1921 novel We, a story set in a dystopian future police state. Despite having been a prominent Old Bolshevik, Zamyatin was deeply disturbed by the policies pursued by the CPSU following the October Revolution. In 1921, We became the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board. Ultimately, Zamyatin arranged for We to be...
NationalityRussian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth1 February 1884
CountryRussian Federation
The mighty power of logic cleanses all it touches.
The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.
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.
The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.
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.
Along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox—the single most worthy path of the fearless mind . . . .
The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity - but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage.
O, mighty, divinely delimited wisdom of walls, boundaries! I is perhaps the most magnificent of all inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he build the first wall. Men ceased to be a wild man only when we built the Green Wall, only when, by means of that wall, we isolated our perfect machine world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds, and animals...
Midsummer Night was roasting hot. The shore, of red granite, glowed with the heat; the dark blood of the earth seemed to be rising from below. There was a sharp, unbearable smell of birds, of cod, of green decaying seaweed. Through the mist the huge ruddy sun loomed nearer and nearer. And in the sea, dark blood welled up to meet it - in bloated, rearing, huge white waves. Night. The mouth of the bay between two cliffs was like a window. A window shutting out curious eyes with a white shade-white woolly fog. And all that you could see was that behind it something red was happening. (The North)
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.
The knife is the most permanent, the most immortal, the most ingenious of man's creations. The knife was a guillotine; the knife is a universal means of resolving all knots...
The microspeed of the tongue ought to be always slightly less than the microspeed of the thoughts and certainly not ever the reverse.
And 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.
The most agonising thing is to drop doubt into a man about his being a reality, three-dimensional - and not some other kind of reality.