"You are afraid of it because it is stronger than you; you hate it because you are afraid of it; you love it because you cannot subdue it to your will. Only the unsubduable can be loved."
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)

"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 Zamyatin (We)

"There is no final one; revolutions are infinite."
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)

"True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics."
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin)

"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."
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin)

"knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith"
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)

"The whole world is one immense woman, and we are in her very womb, we are not yet born, we are joyfully ripening. "
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)

"Along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox—the single most worthy path of the fearless mind . . . ."
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)

"The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom."
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)

"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 then simply because this "once in a thousand years" has come today."
— Yevgeny Zamyatin

"The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity - but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage."
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin)

"What we need in literature today are vast philosophical horizons - horizons seen from mastheads, from airplanes; we need the ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless 'Why' and 'What next?"
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin)

"All of life in its complexity and beauty is forever minted in the gold of words."
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)

"We comes from God, I from the Devil."
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)

"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."
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin)

"You're in a bad way! Apparently, you've developed a soul."
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)

"...Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative..."
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)

"Was it not I who populated with them all these pages—just recently no more than white rectangular deserts? Without me, would they ever be seen by those whom I shall lead behind me along the narrow paths of lines?"
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)

"The speed of her tongue is not correctly calculated; the speed per second of her toungue should be slightly less than the speed per second of her thoughts -at any rate not the reverse."
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)

"But then, the sky! Blue, untainted by a single cloud (the Ancientes had such barbarous tastes given that their poets could have been inspired by such stupid, sloppy, silly-lingering clumps of vapour). I love - and i'm certain that i'm not mistaken if i say we love - skies like this, sterile and flawless! On days like these, the whole world is blown from the same shatterproof, everlasting glass as the glass of the Green Wall and of all our structures. On days like these, you can see to the very blue depths of things, to their unknown surfaces, those marvelous expressions of mathematical equality - which exist in even the most usual and everyday objects. "
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)

""Was it not I who populated with them all these pages—just recently no more than white rectangular deserts? Without me, would they ever be seen by those whom I shall lead behind me along the narrow paths of lines?""
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)

"What did people - from their very infancy - pray for, dream about, long for? They longed for some one to tell them, once and for all, the meaning of happiness, and then to bind them to it with a chain. What are we doing now, if not this very thing? The ancient dream of paradise... Remember: those in paradise no longer know desires, no longer know pity or love. There are only the blessed, with their imaginations excised (this is the only reason why they are blessed) - angels, obedient slaves of God... And now, at the very moment when we have already caught up with dream, when we have seized it so, when all that needed to done was to the quarry and divide it into shares - at this very moment you... you... "
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)