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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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Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.
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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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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 see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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...it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.
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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If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently.
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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.
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.
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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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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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Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.
Stanislaw Lem
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I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.
Stanislaw Lem