“Individualism is the cradle of vulgarity.”

From a letter written in 1911 <br class="br">Usually cited as Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever. http://web.archive.org/web/20060421175318/http://www.uranos.eu.org/biogr/ciolke.html

"Tomorrow" (1919), as translated in A Soviet Heretic : Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1970) edited and translated by Mirra Ginsburg
Context: Every today is at the same time both a cradle and a shroud: a shroud for yesterday, a cradle for tomorrow. Today, yesterday, and tomorrow are equally near to one another, and equally far. They are generations, they are grandfathers, fathers, and grandsons. And grandsons invariably love and hate the fathers; the fathers invariably hate and love the grandfathers.
Today is doomed to die — because yesterday died, and because tomorrow will be born. Such is the wise and cruel law. Cruel, because it condemns to eternal dissatisfaction those who already today see the distant peaks of tomorrow; wise, because eternal dissatisfaction is the only pledge of eternal movement forward, eternal creation. He who has found his ideal today is, like Lot's wife, already turned to a pillar of salt, has already sunk into the earth and does not move ahead. The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy: tomorrow is an inevitable heresy of today, which has turned into a pillar of salt, and to yesterday, which has scattered to dust. Today denies yesterday, but is a denial of denial tomorrow. This is the constant dialectic path which in a grandiose parabola sweeps the world into infinity. Yesterday, the thesis; today, the antithesis, and tomorrow, the synthesis.

"Thinkings"

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 79

"Einstein's Reply to Criticisms" (1949), The World As I See It (1949)
Context: When we survey our lives and endeavors we soon observe that almost the whole of our actions and desires are bound up with the existence of other human beings. We see that our whole nature resembles that of the social animals. We eat food that others have grown, wear clothes that others have made, live in houses that others have built. The greater part of our knowledge and beliefs has been communicated to us by other people through the medium of a language which others have created. Without language our mental capacities would be poor indeed, comparable to those of the higher animals; we have, therefore, to admit that we owe our principal advantage over the beasts to the fact of living in human society. The individual, if left alone from birth would remain primitive and beast-like in his thoughts and feelings to a degree that we can hardly conceive. The individual is what he is and has the significance that he has not so much in virtue of his individuality, but rather as a member of a great human society, which directs his material and spiritual existence from the cradle to the grave.

Source: Invisible Monsters

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Source: Monsieur Ouine, 1943, p.244