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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.

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
Given
Tasks
Firsts
Machines
First
Figure
Way
Consider
Figures
Smart
Perform
Worth
Machine
Instead
Task

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Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.
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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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I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.
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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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The night stared me in the face, amorphous, blind, infinite, without frontiers. Not a single start relieved the darkness behind the glass.
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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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No one reads if someone does read, he doesn't understand if he understands, he immediately forgets.
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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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The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.
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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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Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.
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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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Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.
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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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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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Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?
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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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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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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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