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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.

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
History
Thousands
Sense
Fate
Doe
Hundred
Anything
Single
Mean
Millions
Men
Rich
Word
Adequate
Less
Significance

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A smart machine will first consider which is more worth its while: to perform the given task or, instead, to figure some way out of it.
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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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Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?
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Either something is authentic or it is unauthentic, it is either false or true, make-believe or spontaneous life yet here we are faced with a prevaricated truth and an authentic fake, hence a thing that is at once the truth and a lie.
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The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.
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I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.
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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.
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It is not good for a man to be too cognizant of his physical and spiritual mechanisms. Complete knowledge reveals limits to human possibilities, and the less a man is by nature limited in his purposes, the less he can tolerate limits.
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I do not like the way people use the more and more magnificent fruits of technology to their filthy deeds.
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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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If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?
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Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.
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The war of good and evil present in all religions does not always end, in every faith, with the victory of good, but in every one it establishes a clear order of existence. The sacred as well as the profane rests on that universal order.
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You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down.
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Solaristics, wrote Muntius, is a substitute for religion in the space age. It is faith wrapped in the cloak of science contact, the goal for which we are striving, is as vague and obscure as communion with the saints or the coming of the Messiah.
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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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If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently.
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Plentitude, when too plentitudinous, was worst than destitution, for obviously what could one do, if there was nothing one could not?
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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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