Stanisław Lem Quotes

Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.

Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him. Man can serve his age or rebel against it, but the target of his cooperation or rebellion comes to him from outside.

In a rocket a person can burst like a bubble, or solidify completely, or boil, or explode in a fountain of blood so quickly he doesn't have time to shout out, and then only his bones will be clattering against the metal, and they'll go on circling in Newtonian orbit with an Einsteinian adjustment, our rattles of progress! And we'll go willingly, because it's a beautiful journey, till we arrive, and in these cabins, over this tableware, amid the immortal dishwashers, with our serried ranks of faithful lockers, our devoted toilets, here is our fulfillment.

If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently.

Really, one of us ought to have the courage to call the experiment off and shoulder the responsibility for the decision, but the majority reckons that that kind of courage would be a sign of cowardice, and the first step in a retreat. They think it would mean an undignified surrender for mankind — as if there was any dignity in floundering and drowning in what we don't understand and never will.

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 out what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.

Any attempt to understand the motivation of these occurrences is blocked by our own anthropomorphism. Where there are no men, there cannot be motives accessible to men.

You are only a puppet. But you don't realize that you are.

We are only seeking Man. 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. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilisation superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us — that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence — then we don't like it any more.

A man who for an entire week does nothing but hit himself over the head has little reason to be proud.

The ancients used to say: mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur — the world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived.

Starożytni mawiali: 'mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur'. Świat łaknie oszustw, więc jest oszukiwany.

The number of one's possible fantasies is inversely proportional to the amount of one's liquid assets. For him who has everything dreams are no longer possible.

The twentieth century had dispensed with the formal declaration of war and introduced the fifth column, sabotage, cold war, and war by proxy, but that was only the beginning. Summit meetings for disarmament pursued mutual understanding and a balance of power but were also held to learn the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy. The world of the war-or-peace alternative became a world in which war was peace and peace war.

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.