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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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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
Constantly
Dissolves
Image
Microscope
Ultimate
Microscopes
Whose
Skepticism
Existence
Increased
Possible
Sharp
Things
Begins
Magnification
Like
Finally
Inferred

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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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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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The demand for absolute purity of genres is becoming nowadays an anachronism in literature.
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I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.
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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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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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Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.
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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.
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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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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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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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Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.
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Where do consequences lead? Depends on the escort.
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If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently.
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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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To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.
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There are no answers, only choices.
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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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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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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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