Each civilization may choose one of two roads to travel, that is, either fret itself to death, or pet itself to death. And in the course of doing one or the other, it eats its way into the Universe, turning… — Stanislaw Lem Copy Share Image
That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard… — Stanislaw Lem Copy Share Image
“. . . according to Lem's Law, 'No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets' --… — Stanislaw Lem Copy Share Image
Futurologists have been multiplying like flies since the day Herman Kahn made Cassandra's profession "scientific," yet somehow not one of them has come out with the clear statement that we have wholly abandoned ourselves to the mercy of technological progress. The roles are now reversed: humanity becomes, for technology, a means, an instrument for achieving a goal unknown and unknowable. — Stanislaw Lem Copy Share
When the Universe was not so out of whack as it is today, and all the stars were lined up in their proper places, so you could easily count them from left to right, or top to bottom, and the larger and bluer ones were set apart, and the smaller, yellowing types pushed off to the corners as bodies of… — Stanislaw Lem Copy Share
Psychoanalytic doctrine reveals the pig in man, a pig saddled with a conscience; the disastrous result is that the pig is uncomfortable beneath that… — Stanislaw Lem Copy Share Image
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways. Our symptotes no longer out of phase, We shall encounter,… — Stanislaw Lem Copy Share Image
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… — Stanislaw Lem Copy Share
“Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him. (tr. by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox)” — Stanislaw Lem Copy Share Image
Of the two powers, the two categories that take possession of us when we enter the world (from where?), space is by far the… — Stanislaw Lem Copy Share Image
“What was civilization ever, really, but the attempt by man to talk himself into being good? Only good mind you. The rest had to… — Stanislaw Lem Copy Share Image
