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

More quotes by Stanislaw Lem

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The demand for absolute purity of genres is becoming nowadays an anachronism in literature.
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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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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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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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I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.
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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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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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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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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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Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.
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Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.
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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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I see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments.
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If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?
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I never read to kill time. Killing time is like killing someone's wife or a child. There is nothing more precious for me than time.
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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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There are no answers, only choices.
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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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No one reads if someone does read, he doesn't understand if he understands, he immediately forgets.
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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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