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

More quotes by 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.
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There is only one positive role of the Nobel prize--it creates some common way to understand a writer. I cannot say, that I like this situation, but that's the way it goes. The books are being born and then walk around the world, just as children do.
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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.
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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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The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.
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You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down.
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I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.
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Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.
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Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.
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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 does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him.
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A dream will always triumph over reality, once it is given the chance.
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Where do consequences lead? Depends on the escort.
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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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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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Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.
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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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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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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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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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