Stanisław Lem Quotes

Yes, it's comforting to know, when you think about it, that only man can be a bastard

I should acquaint the reader with the basic principles of the mythology I adhered to then. I believed . . . that inanimate objects were no less fallible than people. They, too, could be forgetful. And, if you had enough patience, you could catch them by surprise.

To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.

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

We owe our liberation to chemistry," he went on. "For all perception is but a change in the concentration of hydrogen ions on the surface of the brain cells. Seeing me, you actually experience a disturbance in the sodium-potassium equilibrium across your neuron membranes. So all we have todo is send a few well-chosen molecules down into those cortical mitochondria, activate the right neurohumoral-synaptic transmission effector sites, and your fondest dreams come true. But you knowall this," he concluded, subdued.

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.

No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.

We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.