We

by Yevgeny Zamyatin

If they will not understand that we are bringing them a mathematically infallible happiness, we shall be obliged to force them to be happy.

Blessedly blue sky, little baby suns on each badge, faces undimmed by anything so crazy as thought.

It’s just more of her thought getting ahead of itself, like a spark that fires too early in the ignition, which can do some harm at times.

Her smile was a bite, and I was its target.

Maybe it was the strange opaque dwellings of the ancients that gave rise to their pitiful cellular psychology.

“And just think . . . here they loved ‘just because,’ they burned, they tormented themselves.” Again, she lowered the blinds of her eyes. “What an idiotic, what a wasteful expense of human energy, don’t you think?”

An idea hit me: The way the human body is built, it’s just as stupid as those “apartments”—human heads are opaque and there’s no way to see inside except through those tiny little windows, the eyes.

When the velocity of an aero is reduced to 0, it is not in motion; when a man’s freedom is reduced to zero, he commits no crimes. That’s clear. The only means to rid man of crime is to rid him of freedom.

Those two in Paradise, they were offered a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness, nothing else. Those idiots chose freedom.

The highest thing in Man is his reason, and what the work of reason comes down to is the continual limitation of infinity, dividing infinity up into convenient, easily digestible portions: differentiation.

Everything used to revolve around the sun; now I knew it all revolved around me—slowly, blissfully, squinting its eyes.

About five centuries back, when the work in Operations was only just getting under way, there were certain idiots who compared Operations with the ancient Inquisition. But that’s just as stupid as equating a surgeon doing a tracheotomy with a highway robber. They might both be holding the same knife in their hand and doing the same thing—cutting a living human being’s throat open—but one of them is a benefactor and the other’s a criminal, one has a + sign and the other a – sign.

I see the INTEGRAL thinking about its great and terrifying future, about the heavy burden of inescapable happiness that it will carry there, upward, to you, the unknown ones, to you who seek eternally and never find. You will find, you will be happy. It is your duty to be happy. And you don’t have long to wait.

And then a little thought wormed its way into my head: “And what if yellow-eyes, in his stupid, dirty pile of leaves, in his uncalculated life, is happier than us?”

Even among the ancients the more grown-up knew that the source of right is power, that right is a function of power.

And the natural path from nullity to greatness is this: Forget that you’re a gram and feel yourself a millionth part of a ton.

So what if nothing but the breadth of a knife blade separates us from the other dark side of the Zero Cliff? A knife is the most permanent, the most immortal, the most ingenious of all of man’s creations. The knife was a guillotine, the knife is a universal means of resolving all knots, and the path of paradox lies along the blade of a knife—the only path worthy of the mind without fear. . . .