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...it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.

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
Difficult
Easy
Clutches
Believe
Loathsome
Considerably
Clutch
Dread
Monsters
Escape

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Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?
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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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Nothing, my dear and clever colleague, is not your run-of-the-mill nothing, the result of idleness and inactivity, but dynamic, aggressive Nothingness, that is to say, perfect, unique, ubiquitous, in other words Nonexistence, ultimate and supreme.
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I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.
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You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down.
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Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.
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A dream will always triumph over reality, once it is given the chance.
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Our ability to adapt and therefore to accept everything is one of our greatest dangers. Creatures that are completely flexible, changeable, can have no fixed morality.
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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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Have it compose a poem -- a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!
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Where do consequences lead? Depends on the escort.
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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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Science is turning into a monastery for the Order of Capitulant Friars. Logical calculus is supposed to supersede man as moralist. We submit to the blackmail of the 'superior knowledge' that has the temerity to assert that nuclear war can be, by derivation, a good thing, because this follows from simple arithmetic.
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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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Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him.
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I have to admit that he was not bad at combinatorial analysis - a branch, however, that even then I considered to be dried up.
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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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Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.
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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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