Quotes from Stanis?aw Lem

One female magnifican, who hardly ever dropped in on us, for some unknown reason took a shine to me and once, after downing Lord knows how many mugs of mineral oil, whispered: "Thou art cute. Wilt have me? Let us hyen to my hous, our-selven ther for to up-hooken . . ." I pretended that a sudden cathode discharge had made it impossible for me to hear her words.

the old doctrine of ignoramus et ignorabimus—"we do not know and will not know.

Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur

That is how the dream begins. All around me, something is awaiting my consent, my inner acquiescence, and I know, or rather the knowledge exists, that I must not give way to an unknown temptation, for the more the silence seems to promise, the more terrible the outcome will be. Yet I essentially know no such thing, because I would be afraid if I knew, and I never felt the slightest fear.

Thus the means of civilization replace its ends, and human conveniences substitute for human values.

On the whole, people tend to trust too much in the evidence of their senses; if they should happen to see a deceased acquaintance in public, they would sooner believe in a resurrection than admit to their own insanity.

the subordinates had to behave that way; they were hiding from the victims in the hatred of them, but the hatred could not be produced in themselves except through acts of brutality.

Noi cerchiamo solo l'uomo. Non abbiamo bisogno di altri mondi, abbiamo bisogno di specchi. Non sappiamo che cosa farcene di altri mondi. Uno ci basta, quello in cui sguazziamo.

Nauka obja?nia ?wiat, ale pogodzi? z nim mo?e jedynie sztuka.

On the one hand, we have no choice but to trust in our technology. Without it we would never have set foot on the Moon. But . . . sometimes we have to pay a high price for that trust.

the subordinates had to behave that way; they were hiding from the victims in the hatred of them, but the hatred could not be produced in themselves except through acts of brutality. They had to batter the Jews with their rifle butts; blood had to flow from lacerated heads and crust upon faces, because it made the faces hideous, inhuman, and in this way—I am quoting Rappaport—there did not appear, in what was done, a gap through which horror might peer, or compassion.

Zagledal je temno, veliko, obla?no nebo, iz katerega — je pomislil — so pred stoletji izgnali Boga, pribežališ?e slabi?ev in premagancev.

to Hogarth humanity is a hunchback who, in ignorance of the fact that it is possible not to be hunchbacked, for thousands of years has sought an indication of a Higher Necessity in his hump, because he will accept any theory but the one that says that his deformity is purely accidental, that no one bestowed it upon him as part of a master plan, that it serves absolutely no purpose, for the thing was determined by the twists and turns of anthropogenesis.

In this way the ocean not only in a certain sense knew the Einstein-Boeve hypothesis, but (unlike us humans) was even able to make use of its consequences.

The shame of a genius may be his intellectual futility, the knowledge of how uncertain is all that he has accomplished. And genius is, above all, constant doubting.

Politics views the globe exactly as it did in the preceding centuries (but now translunar space is included)—as a chessboard for contests. But all along, that board has been surreptitiously changing; it is no more a stationary ground, a foundation, but a raft, afloat and splintering under the blows of unseen currents that are carrying it in a direction in which no one has been looking.

Genius is not so much a light as it is a constant awareness of the surrounding gloom, and its typical cowardice is to bathe in its own glow and avoid, as much as possible, looking out beyond its boundary.

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.

It was as if we knew goodness knows how many specimens, whereas in reality there was still only one, which admittedly weighted seventeen billion tons.

The ocean—a source of electrical, magnetic, and gravitational impulses—spoke as it were in the language of mathematics; certain sequences of its electrical discharges could be classified by drawing on the most abstract branches of terrestrial analysis and of set theory; they contained homologues of structures known from the area of physics that is concerned with the mutual relationship between energy and matter, finite and infinite magnitude, particles and fields.

One has only to look through the history of science to reach the most probable conclusion: that the shape of things to come is determined by things we do not know today, and by what is unforeseeable.

Los políticos son demasiado tontos para que nosotros podamos prever sus acciones aplicando la razón

we imagine Him sadistic not because He made us that way, but because we are ourselves that way.

What poets they were, those anatomists, my dear sir, what names they gave to all those parts, the purposes of which they didn't understand at all: the hippocampus . . . Ammon's horn . . . the corpora quadrigemina . . . the calcarine fissure . . .