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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
Doe
Appearances
Men
Impose
Spite
Gods
Appearance
Create
Age
Times
Solaris

More quotes by 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.
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The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.
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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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We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us but we can't accept it for what it is.
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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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...it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.
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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A dream will always triumph over reality, once it is given the chance.
Stanislaw Lem
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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.
Stanislaw Lem
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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...
Stanislaw Lem
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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.
Stanislaw Lem
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There are no answers, only choices.
Stanislaw Lem
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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.
Stanislaw Lem
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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.
Stanislaw Lem
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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.
Stanislaw Lem
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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.
Stanislaw Lem
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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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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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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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If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently.
Stanislaw Lem