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

More quotes by 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.
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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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Burn with that consuming fire of objectivity that forces a man to renew efforts that are doomed to failure.
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Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.
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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.
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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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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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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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Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.
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If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently.
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Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him.
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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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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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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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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
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Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.
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.
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The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.
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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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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