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I don't resist progress, but I have a growing feeling that mankind uses it mostly for disgraceful purposes.

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
Mostly
Mankind
Progress
Growing
Feeling
Disgraceful
Purpose
Purposes
Use
Resist
Feelings
Uses

More quotes by Stanislaw Lem

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I see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments.
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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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I do not like the way people use the more and more magnificent fruits of technology to their filthy deeds.
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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.
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No one reads if someone does read, he doesn't understand if he understands, he immediately forgets.
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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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If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?
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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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Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.
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I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.
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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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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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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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...it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.
Stanislaw Lem
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The demand for absolute purity of genres is becoming nowadays an anachronism in literature.
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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We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.
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.
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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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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.
Stanislaw Lem