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Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him.

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
Men
Impose
Spite
Gods
Appearance
Create
Age
Times
Solaris
Doe
Appearances

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If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?
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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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Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.
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Burn with that consuming fire of objectivity that forces a man to renew efforts that are doomed to failure.
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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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I do not like the way people use the more and more magnificent fruits of technology to their filthy deeds.
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To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.
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That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...
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The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.
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Where do consequences lead? Depends on the escort.
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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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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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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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I see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments.
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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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Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?
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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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The demand for absolute purity of genres is becoming nowadays an anachronism in literature.
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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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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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