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True literature can exist only when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin I Am Afraid (1921)

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More quotes by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Science and art both project the world along certain coordinates. Differences in form are due only to differences in the coordinates.

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)

Realism that is not primitive, not realia but realiora, consists in displacement, distortion, curvature, non-objectivity.

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)

Every today is at the same time both a cradle and a shroud: a shroud for yesterday, a cradle for tomorrow.

Tomorrow (1919)

Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)

The sole means of ridding man of crime is to rid him of freedom.

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Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Francis Bacon Meditationes sacræ (1597)

It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge.

Albert Pike Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871)

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Logan Pearsall Smith Afterthoughts (1931)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Yevgeny Zamyatin (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.