I ask: what was it that man from his diaper age dreamed of, tormented himself for, prayed for? He longed for that day when someone would tell him what happiness is and then would chain him to it. What else are we doing now?
Book 1924
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About the book
In the glass-walled United State of a far future, people are numbers who live by a timetable under the all-powerful Well-Doer. D-503, the chief engineer of a spaceship, starts a diary in praise of this perfectly ordered life, until a meeting with a woman called I-330 begins to unsettle him. Written in Russia around 1920, it is one of the earliest dystopian novels.
7 quotes
I shall explain it to you in your own language and you will understand better: there are two forces in the world, entropy and energy. One leads into blessed quietude, to happy equilibrium, the other to the destruction of equilibrium, to torturingly perpetual…
Your mission is to subjugate to the grateful yoke of reason the unknown beings who live on other planets, and who are perhaps still in the primitive state of freedom. If they will not understand that we are bringing them a mathematically faultless happiness…
There were two in paradise and the choice was offered to them: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. No other choice. … They, fools that they were, chose freedom. Naturally, they longed for centuries afterwards for fetters, for the fetters…
There is no last revolution, their number is infinite.... The 'last one' is a children's story. Children are afraid of the infinite, and it is necessary that children should not be frightened, so that they may sleep through the night.
Right is a function of might. Here we have our scale: on the one side an ounce, on the other a ton. On one side "I," on the other "we," the United State. Is it not clear? To assume that I may have any "right" as far as the State is concerned, is like assuming…
Liberation! It is remarkable how persistent human criminal instincts are! I use deliberately the word "criminal," for freedom and crime are as closely related as — well, as the movement of an aero and its speed: if the speed of an aero equals zero, the aero is…