Quotes by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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!

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.

Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics.

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

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.

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

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

Envy is an insult to oneself.

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

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