Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884 - 1937) was one of the first Soviet dissidents, exiled from the fledgling USSR for his writings against the regime. He penned the novel We, a dystopian novel set in a police state, that very likely influenced both Ayn Rand and George Orwell.

On books:

“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.”

On art:

“The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.”

“If [modern artists] hadn’t lobbied for endless subsidies, they would have starved or been forced to go to work long ago. Because the ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for ‘art’ that leaves him unmoved.”

On freedom and happiness:

“…Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative…”

“I ask you: what have people – from the very cradle- prayed for dreamed about and agonized over They wanted someone anyone to tell them once and for all what happiness is – and then to attach them to this happiness with a chain…”

On society:

“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.”

“Yesterday, there was a Tzar and there were slaves. Today, there is no Tzar, but the slaves are still here. Tomorrow there will be only Tzars. We walk forward in the name of the free man of tomorrow, the Tzar of tomorrow. We have gone through the epoch when the masses were oppressed. We are now going through the epoch when the individual is oppressed in the name of the masses.”

“Revolution is everywhere, in everything. There is no final revolution, no final number.”

On heretics:

“If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.”

“The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy.”