Quotes by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
I love sport because I love life, and sport is one of the basic joys of life.
Only when the sense of the pain of others begins does man begin.
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.
Justice is like a train that is nearly always late.
Time has a way of demonstrating that the most stubborn are the most intelligent.
Sorrow happens, hardship happens, the hell with it, who never knew the price of happiness, will not be happy.
Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful.
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
Great twentieth century: sputnik century: what an angst is in you, what wide perplexity! You are a good century and a century of the pit, cannibal century to the ideas you beget, century of the angry young men's target.
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!
In any man who dies there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight. Not people die but worlds die in them.
Envy is an insult to oneself.
He who is conceived in a cage yearns for the cage.
No, Stalin did not die. He thinks that death can be fixed. We removed him from the mausoleum. But how do we remove Stalin from Stalin's heirs?
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.
