Yevgeny Yevtushenko

“How can the confessor teach/ those who are lost and sick at heart,/ when he himself, among the sinners,/ is worst, and most forsaken?/ It is only a game we play/ with other people's sins./ Besides, everyone knows/ that everyone lies confessing.”

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

“Only when the sense of the pain of others begins does man begin.”

“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.”

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

“They tell me, shaking their heads:"You should be kinder. You are somehow furious".I used to be kind. It didn’t last long.”

“He who is conceived in a cage yearns for the cage.”

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

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

“Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.”

“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!”

“Envy is an insult to oneself.”

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

“Justice is like a train that is nearly always late.”

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

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

“Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics.”

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