Yevgeny Yevtushenko Quotes

When there is freedom of speech, I've found that the majority of people really have nothing to say.

Envy is an insult to oneself.

Character begins to form at the first pinch of anxiety about ourselves.

Unfortunately justice is the train that's nearly always late.

Give me a mystery - just a plain and simple one - a mystery which is diffidence and silence, a slim little bare-foot mystery: give me a mystery - just one!

To partly remain a child: that is to be really mature.

Those who are used to a cage will weep for a cage.

Ever since then I have known that if all the values in this world are more or less questionable, the most important thing in life is kindness.

Be equal to your talent, not your age. At times let the gap between them be embarrassing.

One day posterity will remember these strange times, when ordinary common honesty was called courage.

In my blood there is no Jewish blood. In their callous rage, all anti-Semites must hate me now as a Jew. For that reason I am a true Russian.

I love sport because I love life, and sport is one of the basic joys of life.

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.

Sorrow happens, hardship happens, the hell with it, who never knew the price of happiness, will not be happy.

Only when the sense of the pain of others begins does man begin

Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful.

Everything I do, I do on the principle of Russian borscht. You can throw everything into it beets, carrots, cabbage, onions, everything you want. What's important is the result, the taste of the borscht.

When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie.

He who is conceived in a cage, yearns for the cage.

Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?

Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics.

But time has a way of demonstrating the most stubborn are the most intelligent.

There is no need to fear the strong. All one needs is to know the method of overcoming them. There is a special jujitsu for every strong man.

In any man who dies there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight... Not people die but worlds die in them.

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can only be a footnote.

He watched through a crack inside just pretending to be dead he wanted to fix each pallbearer in his memory . . . it seems to me a telephone was installed in the coffin to someone yet again Stalin is sending his instructions.

True sport is always a duel, a duel with nature, with one's own fear, with one's own fatigue, a duel in which the body and the mind are strengthened.

In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies.

Life is a rainbow which also includes black.