We

by Yevgeny Zamyatin

But we, people of today, we know all too well that dreaming is a serious mental disease.

Liberation! It is remarkable how persistent human criminal instincts are! I use deliberately the word “criminal,” for freedom and crime are as closely related as—well, as the movement of an aero and its speed: if the speed of an aero equals zero, the aero is motionless; if human liberty is equal to zero, man does not commit any crime. That is clear. The way to rid man of criminality is to rid him of freedom.

There were two in paradise and the choice was offered to them: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness.

If I only knew who I am. Which I am I?

The ancient god created ancient man, i.e., the man capable of mistakes; ergo, the ancient god himself made a mistake. The multiplication table is more wise and more absolute than the ancient god, for the multiplication table never (do you understand—never) makes mistakes!

The gods have become like us, ergo we have become like gods. And we shall come to you, my unknown readers on another planet, we shall come to you to make your life as godlike, as rational, and as correct as our own …

no longer live in our rational world but in the ancient delirious world, in a world of the square root of minus one?

Man ceased to be a wild animal the day he built the first wall; man ceased to be a wild man only on the day when the Green Wall was completed, when by this wall we isolated our machine-like, perfect world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds, and beasts.…

“We” is from “God,” “I,” from the devil.

I felt myself. To feel one’s self, to be conscious of one’s personality, is the lot of an eye inflamed by a cinder, or an infected finger, or a bad tooth. A healthy eye, or finger, or tooth is not felt; it is nonexistent, as it were. Is it not clear, then, that consciousness of oneself is a sickness?