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.
Temperance is simply a disposition of the mind which binds the passion.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, has a more direct bearing on the moral choices made by individuals or the purposes pursued by society than belief or disbelief in God.
The future will present insurmountable problems- only when we consider them insurmountable.
Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.
He look'd in years, yet in his years were seen A youthful vigor, and autumnal green.
Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.
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