Quotes from Stanis?aw Lem

A writer should not run around with a mirror for his countrymen; he should tell his society and his times things no one ever thought before.

The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word.

I had no hope. Yet expectation lived on in me, the last thing she had left behind. What further consummations, mockeries, torments did I still anticipate? I had no idea as I abided in the unshaken belief that the time of cruel wonders was not yet over.

I never read to kill time. Killing time is like killing someone's wife or a child. There is nothing more precious for me than time.

it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.

War is the worst way of gathering knowledge about a foreign culture.