The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.
Interpretation
True freedom can lead to crime, suggesting that limitations may be necessary for societal order.
In this quote, Yevgeny Zamyatin explores the complex relationship between freedom and crime. He argues that absolute freedom can result in chaos and criminal behavior, implying that some restrictions on freedom might be required to maintain social order and prevent crime. This thought-provoking statement raises important questions about the balance between liberty and societal safety.
In practice
During a debate on law and personal freedoms, one might use this quote to discuss the need for balance between security and freedom.
The knife is the most durable, immortal, the most genius thing that man created. The knife was the guillotine; the knife is the universal means of solving all knots; and along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox - the single most worthy path of the fearless mind.
Accentuated plainness and accentuated vice ought to bring about harmony. Beauty lies in harmony, in style, whether it be the harmony of ugliness or beauty, vice or virtue.
The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy...
The lilac branches are bowed under the weight of the flowers: blooming is hard, and the most important thing is - to bloom. (βA Story About The Most Important Thingβ)
A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth reading.
Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith.
I often don't say things out loud, even when I should. I contain and compartmentalize to a disturbing degree: In my belly-basement are hundreds of bottles of rage, despair, fear, but you'd never guess from looking at me.
We are, all of us, growing volcanoes that approach the hour of their eruption, but how near or distant that is, nobody knows- not even God.
In the developed world, hundreds of millions of us now face the bizarre problem of surfeit. Yet our brains, instincts, and socialized behavior are still geared to an environment of lack. The result? Overwhelm - on an unprecedented scale.
He has no right to his life when his duty calls him to resign it. Other men are bound... to deprive him of life or liberty, if that should appear in any case to be indispensably necessary to prevent a greater evil.
They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.
He that has learned to feel his sins, and to trust Christ as a Saviour, has learned the two hardest and greatest lessons in Christianity.
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