Stanisław Lem Quotes

Human beings set out to encounter other worlds, other civilizations, without having fully gotten to know their own hidden recesses, their blind alleys, well shafts, dark barricaded doors.

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

She was beautiful all right, beautiful in a way that was at once seductive, demonic, and raspberry.

It’s what we wanted: contact with another civilization. We have it, this contact! Our own monstrous ugliness, our own buffoonery and shame, magnified as if it was under a microscope!

"The year is 2098", he said, "with 69 billion inhabitants legally registered and approximately another 26 billion in hiding. The average annual temperature has fallen four degrees. In fifteen or twenty years there will be glaciers here. We have no way of averting or halting their advance - we can only keep them secret."
"I always thought there would be ice in hell," I said. "And so you paint the gates with pretty pictures?"

He who has had, has been, but he who hasn't been, has been had.

I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.

What was civilization ever, really, but the attempt by man to talk himself into being good? Only good, mind you. The rest had to be shoved somewhere out of sight, under the rug. Which History indeed did, at times politely, at times police-ly, and yet something was always sticking out, breaking loose, overthrowing.

Czy jeżeli ludożerca je nożem i widelcem - to postęp?

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

Such labor follows in the steps of Freud, who has become the Ptolemy of psychology, for now, with him, anyone can explain human phenomena, raising epicycles upon epicycles...

It was not possible to think except with one’s brain, no one could stand outside himself in order to check the functioning of his inner processes.

For what are myths if not the imposing of order on phenomena that do not possess order in themselves? And all myths, however they differ from philosophical systems and scientific theories, share this with them, that they negate the principle of randomness in the world.

Evolution is, as an engineer, an opportunist, not a perfectionist.

...;he was at home whenever he could quench his thirst for knowledge;...