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

More quotes by Stanislaw Lem

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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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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.
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A dream will always triumph over reality, once it is given the chance.
Stanislaw Lem
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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.
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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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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.
Stanislaw Lem
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I had no hope. Yet expectation lived on in me, the last thing she had left behind. What further consummations, mockeries, torments did I still anticipate? I had no idea as I abided in the unshaken belief that the time of cruel wonders was not yet over.
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I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.
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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?
Stanislaw Lem
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Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.
Stanislaw Lem
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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.
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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I have to admit that he was not bad at combinatorial analysis - a branch, however, that even then I considered to be dried up.
Stanislaw Lem
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I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.
Stanislaw Lem
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You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down.
Stanislaw Lem
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Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.
Stanislaw Lem
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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.
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.
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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!
Stanislaw Lem
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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.
Stanislaw Lem