With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not — they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.
Bio: Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin was a Russian author of science fiction and political satire. He is most famous for his 1921 novel We, a story set in a dystopian future police state.