While attempting to track down exact wording and attribution for Dostoevsky’s famous phrase, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted” — which supposedly was uttered by Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, I discovered David Cortesi’s assertion that the famous quote is not to be found in English translations of The Brothers Karamazov or in any of Dostoevsky’s novels. Cortesi suspects, instead, that the famous phrase comes from Sartre, who supposedly wrote
“The existentialist…finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven….Dostoevsky once wrote, ‘If God did not exist, everything would be permitted,…” — www.science.wayne.edu/~mlee/antipsyc/duerf2.html
Even Christiaan Stange’s Doetoevsky Research Station website admits the uncertainty of the quote.
But apparently the phrase does occur in the novel’s original Russian Continue reading