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Quotes from His Master's Voice — Stanisław Lem

1921–2006 Poland

← All quotes by Stanisław Lem

4 quotes

Genius is not so much a light as it is a constant awareness of the surrounding gloom.

His Master's Voice (1968)

Science is turning into a monastery for the Order of Capitulant Friars. Logical calculus is supposed to supersede man as moralist. We submit to the blackmail of the "superior knowledge" that has the temerity to assert that nuclear war can be, by derivation, a good thing, because this follows from simple arithmetic.

His Master's Voice (1968)

Skepticism is like a microscope whose magnification is constantly increased: the sharp image that one begins with finally dissolves, because it is not possible to see ultimate things: their existence is only to be inferred.

His Master's Voice (1968)

Futurologists have been multiplying like flies since the day Herman Kahn made Cassandra's profession "scientific," yet somehow not one of them has come out with the clear statement that 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.

His Master's Voice (1968)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Stanisław Lem (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.