Yevgeny Yevtushenko Quotations

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

Time has a way of demonstrating that the most stubborn are the most intelligent.

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

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

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.

Justice is like a train that is nearly always late.

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

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

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

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

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!

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.

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

Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics.

We stopped the war in Afghanistan. We abolished censorship. We abolished the special commissions that were checking on Russian citizens going abroad. I am very happy that in history my name will be connected to this period.

My first book was bad. It concentrated more on form than content,

But what if it doesn't work ... ?/ and they jammed sticks/ In the wheels of the first locomotive/ To make sure it wouldn't work.

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

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

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

The first poem I ever wrote was terrible,

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

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

No Jewish blood runs among my blood,but I am as bitterly and hardly hatedby every anti-semiteas if I were a Jew. By thisI am a Russian.

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

Here we have some people who call themselves Christians and they forget Jesus Christ was a Jew. Something like anti-Semitism is an artificial way of avoiding responsibility. You blame the problems in your country on someone else, on some group.

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

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.

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

[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.

In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable.

All values in this world are more or less questionable, but the most important thing in life is human kindness.

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

Life is a rainbow which also includes black.

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.

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.

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

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.

Envy is an insult to oneself.

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