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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
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Smart
Perform
Worth
Machine
Instead
Task
Given
Tasks
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Machines
First
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Way
Consider
More quotes by Stanislaw Lem
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
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.
Stanislaw Lem
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.
Stanislaw Lem
If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently.
Stanislaw Lem
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
A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other.
Stanislaw Lem
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.
Stanislaw Lem
No one reads if someone does read, he doesn't understand if he understands, he immediately forgets.
Stanislaw Lem
Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.
Stanislaw Lem
I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.
Stanislaw Lem
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
Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?
Stanislaw Lem
Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.
Stanislaw Lem
I do not like the way people use the more and more magnificent fruits of technology to their filthy deeds.
Stanislaw Lem
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
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.
Stanislaw Lem
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.
Stanislaw Lem
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
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
A dream will always triumph over reality, once it is given the chance.
Stanislaw Lem
