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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?

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
Nothing
Destitution
Obviously
Worst

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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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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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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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Our ability to adapt and therefore to accept everything is one of our greatest dangers. Creatures that are completely flexible, changeable, can have no fixed morality.
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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Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?
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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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...it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.
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You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down.
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I see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments.
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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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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.
Stanislaw Lem
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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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Where do consequences lead? Depends on the escort.
Stanislaw Lem
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There are no answers, only choices.
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A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other.
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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 have to admit that he was not bad at combinatorial analysis - a branch, however, that even then I considered to be dried up.
Stanislaw Lem