Yevgeny Yevtushenko Quotes

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

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

 

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.

Life is a rainbow which also includes black.

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

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

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

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

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.

Envy is an insult to oneself.

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

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.

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.

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

 

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

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

I do not like poems that resemble hay compressed into a geometrically perfect cube. I like it when the hay, unkempt, uncombed, with dry berries mixed in it, thrown together gaily and freely, bounces along atop some truck-and more, if there are some lovely and healthy lasses atop the hay-and better yet if the branches catch at the hay, and some of it tumbles to the road.

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

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

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

No people are uninteresting. Their fate is like the chronicles of planets. Nothing in them is not particular, and planet is dissimilar from planet.

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

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

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

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.