Yevgeny Yevtushenko's Quotes

Envy is an insult to oneself.

Time has a way of demonstrating that the most stubborn are the most intelligent.

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

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

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

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.

Justice is like a train that is nearly always late.

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!

He who is conceived in a cage yearns for the cage.

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

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.

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

Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics.

Only when the sense of the pain of others begins does man begin.

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

If you deprive yourself of outsourcing and your competitors do not, you're putting yourself out of business.

I was a product of the times, the war, the occupation, the reoccupation, my 4 years in Britain, admiring but at the same time questioning whether they are able to do a better job than we can.

Well if done a lot of hard work to try and get people to act rationally, the fact that weve had 15 deviant Muslims, plus 5 or 8 others that got away does not mean that all Muslims are deviant or extremists.

I knew that my niece was working nearby with some bank, so my wife rang up the mother and the mother called back to say that shes just called up to say she was alright.

Of-course we did, but we didn't reply because we knew once this leaks the others will scatter, so in the few days we moved quickly before the press got hold of it. The press did get hold of it a few days later, we nabbed, we were able to get 15, the others got away.

The big nest was in Afghanistan, thats not quite cleared, then there are nests in the Philippines, there are nests in Indonesia, the Malaysians are clearing up their nests.

The trouble with us is that the ghetto of the Middle Ages and the children of the twentieth century have to live under one roof.

Poverty was an ornament on a learned man like a red ribbon on a white horse.

A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can't get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.

As for when to reform the yuan, there is no timetable yet.

We will not reform the yuan until the time is right even if there is external pressure.