Quotes by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

• Sorrow happens, hardship happens, the hell with it, who never knew the price of happiness, will not be happy.
• Justice is like a train that is nearly always late.
• Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?
• Time has a way of demonstrating that the most stubborn are the most intelligent.
• Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.
• Only when the sense of the pain of others begins does man begin.
• Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics.
• I love sport because I love life, and sport is one of the basic joys of life.
• He who is conceived in a cage yearns for the cage.
• 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!
• Envy is an insult to oneself.
• A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
• Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful.
• In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies.