Zosima says it to a room of monks and women, and the warning that follows is precise: the man who lies to himself loses the power to tell the truth to anyone else. “If God does not exist, everything is permitted” is a flattening of Ivan Karamazov’s argument, not a sentence the novel stamps as true. Dostoevsky had stood in front of a firing squad that turned out to be a rehearsal. He did not write simple permissions.