Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Time has a way of demonstrating that the most stubborn are the most intelligent.Collection: Time
Sorrow happens, hardship happens, the hell with it, who never knew the price of happiness, will not be happy.Collection: Happiness
Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.Collection: Poetry
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.Collection: Poetry
Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful.
Justice is like a train that is nearly always late.
He who is conceived in a cage yearns for the cage.
Envy is an insult to oneself.
In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies.
I love sport because I love life, and sport is one of the basic joys of life.
Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?
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 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.
Only when the sense of the pain of others begins does man begin.
Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics.
When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie.Collection: Truth
One day posterity will remember these strange times, when ordinary common honesty was called courage.Collection: Honesty
Life is a rainbow which also includes black.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Kindness
Unfortunately justice is the train that's nearly always late.Collection: Justice
When there is freedom of speech, I've found that the majority of people really have nothing to say.Collection: People
To partly remain a child: that is to be really mature.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Strong
He who is conceived in a cage, yearns for the cage.Collection: Freedom
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.Collection: Vegetables
In any man who dies there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight... Not people die but worlds die in them.Collection: Death
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can only be a footnote.Collection: History
In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable.Collection: Believe
Be equal to your talent, not your age. At times let the gap between them be embarrassing.Collection: Age
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.Collection: Perfect
Only when the sense of the pain of others begins does man beginCollection: Sympathy
Those who are used to a cage will weep for a cage.Collection: Cages
No people are uninteresting. Their fate is like the chronicles of planets. Nothing in them is not particular, and planet is dissimilar from planet.Collection: Fate
But time has a way of demonstrating the most stubborn are the most intelligent.Collection: Time
Character begins to form at the first pinch of anxiety about ourselves.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Sports
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.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Running