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For what are myths if not the imposing of order on phenomena that do not possess order in themselves? And all myths, however they differ from philosophical systems and scientific theories, share this with them, that they negate the principle of randomness in the world.

Stanislaw Lem

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Stanislaw Lem
Age: 84 †
Born: 1921
Born: September 12
Died: 2006
Died: March 27
Essayist
Futurist
Philosopher
Physician
Playwright
Poet
Researcher
Satirist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Lemberg
Austria
Stanislaw Lem
Lem
Stanislav Lem
Stanislas Lem
Order
Myth
Randomness
World
Scientific
Differ
Philosophical
Imposing
Principle
Myths
However
Phenomena
Theory
Theories
Principles
Possess
Share
Systems
Negate

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To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.
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The only writers who have any peace are the ones who don't write. And there are some like that. They wallow in a sea of possibilities. To express a thought, you first have to limit it, and that means kill it. Every word I speak robs me of a thousand others, and every line I write means giving up another.
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If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently.
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Where do consequences lead? Depends on the escort.
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The night stared me in the face, amorphous, blind, infinite, without frontiers. Not a single start relieved the darkness behind the glass.
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I don't resist progress, but I have a growing feeling that mankind uses it mostly for disgraceful purposes.
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I see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments.
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Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.
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Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.
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The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word.
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Even a fool could see that one didn't need a war, nuclear or otherwise, to destroy oneself the rising cost of weaponry could do that quite nicely.
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Psychoanalytic doctrine reveals the pig in man, a pig saddled with a conscience the disastrous result is that the pig is uncomfortable beneath that pious rider, and the rider fares no better in the situation, since his endeavor is not only to tame the pig, but also to render it invisible.
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Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?
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Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.
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Come, every frustum longs to be a cone, And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
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We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.
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...it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.
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A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other.
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No one reads if someone does read, he doesn't understand if he understands, he immediately forgets.
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I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.
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