We

by Yevgeny Zamyatin

What he didn’t foresee, as Bykov notes, is the irresistible appeal to the worst in human nature, the very appeal that links the darkest moments of the twentieth century to the autocrats and aspiring autocrats of the twenty-first century. They invite their followers to abandon conventions of dignity and expectations of morality and be their worst selves, together.

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

“Who knows who you really are? A person is like a novel: Up to the very last page you don’t know how it’s going to end. Otherwise, there’d be no point in reading.

What is it that people beg for, dream about, torment themselves for, from the time they leave swaddling clothes? They want someone to tell them, once and for all, what happiness is—and then to bind them to that happiness with a chain.