Stanislaw Lem
Stanislaw Lem
Stanisław Herman Lem; 12 September 1921 – 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy, and satire, and a trained physician. Lem's books have been translated into forty-one languages and have sold over forty-five million copies. From the 1950s to 2000s, he published many books, both science fiction and philosophical/futurological. He is best known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976, Theodore Sturgeon wrote...
NationalityPolish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth12 September 1921
CountryPoland
Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.
Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him.
We are like snails, each stuck to his own leaf.
I don't resist progress, but I have a growing feeling that mankind uses it mostly for disgraceful purposes.
My pessimism (which, by the way, is far from absolute) originated with my despair in the lack of perfection to be found in human nature. I was attempting in my successive books to show the inevitable handicap of the human condition.
For moral reasons ... the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created ... intentionally.
If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently
The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.
Have it compose a poem -- a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!
He who has had, has been, but he who hasn't been, has been had.
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 what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.
Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.
Art gives man a reminder that he is not just a consumer but a creator as well. It awakens in him the urge to struggle and perform great deeds; it fills him with the craving to pass on the Promethean fire to generations to come.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.