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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.

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
Ability
Morality
Everything
Creatures
Accept
Therefore
Changeable
Completely
Dangers
Danger
Adapt
Accepting
Flexible
Greatest
Fixed

More quotes by Stanislaw Lem

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What gave you this idea of an imperfect god?' 'I don't know. It seems quite feasible to me. That is the only god I could imagine believing in, a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing, fulfills no purpose--a god who simply is.
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If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?
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There is only one positive role of the Nobel prize--it creates some common way to understand a writer. I cannot say, that I like this situation, but that's the way it goes. The books are being born and then walk around the world, just as children do.
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There are no answers, only choices.
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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 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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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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Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.
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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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This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past.
Stanislaw Lem
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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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No one reads if someone does read, he doesn't understand if he understands, he immediately forgets.
Stanislaw Lem
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I see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments.
Stanislaw Lem
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Skepticism is like a microscope whose magnification is constantly increased: the sharp image that one begins with finally dissolves, because it is not possible to see ultimate things: their existence is only to be inferred.
Stanislaw Lem
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Burn with that consuming fire of objectivity that forces a man to renew efforts that are doomed to failure.
Stanislaw Lem
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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.
Stanislaw Lem
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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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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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Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.
Stanislaw Lem
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The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.
Stanislaw Lem