Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Stanislaw Lem

Image
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.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
A dream will always triumph over reality, once it is given the chance.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
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.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
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.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
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
Image
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.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
Plentitude, when too plentitudinous, was worst than destitution, for obviously what could one do, if there was nothing one could not?
Stanislaw Lem
Image
If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?
Stanislaw Lem
Image
Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
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.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
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
Image
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.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
I see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
Burn with that consuming fire of objectivity that forces a man to renew efforts that are doomed to failure.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
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!
Stanislaw Lem