His Master's Voice Quotes

“And yet we knew, for a certainty, that when first emissaries of Earth went walking among the planets, Earth's other sons would be dreaming not about such expeditions but about a piece of bread.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“Psychoanalysis provides truth in an infantile, that is, a schoolboy fashion: we learn from it, roughly and hurriedly, things that scandalize us and thereby command our attention. It sometimes happens, and such is the case here, that a simplification touching upon the truth, but cheaply, is of no more value than a lie. Once again we are shown the demon and the angel, the beast and the god locked in Manichean embrace, and once again man has been pronounced, by himself, not culpable.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“Ants that encounter in their path a dead philosopher may make good use of him.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“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.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“Evolution is, as an engineer, an opportunist, not a perfectionist.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“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,”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“It has been said that a specialist is a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“Our ability to adapt and therefore to accept everything is one of our greatest dangers. Creatures that are completely flexible, changeable, can have no fixed morality.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“It turns out, however, that freedom of expression sometimes presents a greater threat to an idea, because forbidden thoughts may circulate in secret, but what can be done when an important fact is lost in a flood of impostors, and the voice of truth becomes drowned out in an ungodly din? When that voice, though freely resounding, cannot be heard, because the technologies of information have led to a situation in which one can receive best the message of him who shouts the loudest, even when the most falsely?”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“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.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“As one whose genius has been duly certified by several dozen learned biographers, I think I may say a word or two on the topic of intellectual summits; which is simply that clarity of thought is a shining point in a vast expanse of unrelieved darkness. 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.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“He assumed a manner that could be called circular irony. Everything he said, he said in quotes, with an artificial, exaggerated emphasis, and with the elocution of someone playing a succession of improvised, ad hoc roles. Therefore, whoever did not know him long and well was confounded, for it seemed impossible ever to tell what the man thought true and what false, and when he was speaking seriously and when he was merely amusing himself with words.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“One day I found him amid large packages from which spilled attractive, glossy paperbacks with mythical covers. He had tried to use, as a "generator of ideas" — for we were running out of them — those works of fantastic literature, that popular genre (especially in the States), called, by a persistent misconception, "science fiction." He had not read such books before; he was annoyed — indignant, even — expecting variety, finding monotony. "They have everything except fantasy," he said. Indeed, a mistake. The authors of these pseudo-scientific fairy tales supply the public with what it wants: truisms, clichés, stereotypes, all sufficiently costumed and made "wonderful" so that the reader may sink into a safe state of surprise and at the same time not be jostled out of his philosophy of life. If there is progress in a culture, the progress is above all conceptual, but literature, the science-fiction variety in particular, has nothing to do with that.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“But ignorance, while it checks the enthusiasm of the sensible, in no way restrains the fools;”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“Достаточно ознакомиться с историей науки, чтобы понять: облик грядущего зависит от того, чего мы сегодня не знаем и что по природе своей непредсказуемо.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“The urge to destruction is deducible from thermodynamics. Life is a fraud, an attempt at embezzlement, seeking to circumvent laws otherwise inevitable and implacable; insulated from the rest of the world, it immediately enters the path of decay, and that inclined plane leads to the normal state of matter, to the permanent equilibrium that is death. In order to continue living, life must feed on order, but because there is no order--none highly organized--other than life, it is condemned to consume itself. It must destroy to live, must take its nourishment from systems that are nourishment only to the extent that they can be ruined. Not ethics but physics determines this law.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“I can see now that I had indeed lost a little of my common sense, my circumspection, and the coolness that comes from the directive of proceeding sine ira et studio—and that I had, with my speculations, shifted the “blame” from the unknown Senders onto humanity, incurable misanthrope that I was.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“This was how I saw it: the Senders definitely had had no intention of sending us a Pandora’s box; but we, like burglars, forced the lock, and stamped upon the plundered contents everything that in Earth’s science was mercenary, predatory.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“I do not know what the letter contains, but—from this standpoint—it cannot contain anything that would bring harm to us. The one would be at too great a variance with the other. Yes, of course, it is possible to choke even on bread. This is the way I see it: if we, with our political systems and our history, represent a cosmic average, then nothing threatens us from the ‘letter.’ That is what you asked about, I believe? Because they must be well aware of this ‘psychozoic constant’ of the Universe. If we constitute a slight aberration, a minority, then that, too, they will take—must have taken, that is—into account. But if we are an extraordinary exception to the rule, a deviant fornva monstrous abnormality that occurs in one galaxy per thousand, once in ten billion years—such a possibility they would be right, in their calculations and in their intentions, not to take into account. In other words, one way or the other they will not be to blame.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“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.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“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.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“Thus the means of civilization replace its ends, and human conveniences substitute for human values.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“Sometimes a person who is valued, respected, even loved by all, cares most, in the innermost recess of his soul, about the opinion of someone who stands uninterested outside the circle of admirers, and who may be, in the eyes of the world, of no particular importance, a mediocrity.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“From a chemical analysis of the ink with which a letter is written to us, we will never deduce the intellectual attributes of the writer.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“I tried putting myself in the place of the Sender. I would send nothing that could be used contrary to my intentions. To provide any kind of tool without knowing to whom would be like handing out grenades to children.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“some similarity—even the most remote—between Those Who Sent the code and the code’s recipients was more than a fantasy to comfort the mind; it was a hypothesis on whose cutting edge hung the future of the entire Project. And I was certain of this from the first, from the moment I set foot on the HMV compound—certain that a lack of any similarity would render futile all efforts to understand the stellar message.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“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.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“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.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“The Project constituted a precedent in which, like those Russian wooden dolls-within-dolls, sat other precedents, and primarily this: that never before had physicists, engineers, chemists, nucleonicists, biologists, or information theorists held in their hands an object of research that represented not only a certain material—hence natural—puzzle, but which had been intentionally made by Someone and transmitted, and where the intent must have taken into account the potential addressee. Because scientists learn to conduct so-called games with nature, with a nature that is not—from any permissible point of view—a personal antagonist, they are unable to countenance the possibility that behind the object of investigation there indeed stands a Someone, and that to become familiar with that object will be possible only insofar as one draws near, through reasoning, to its completely anonymous creator. Therefore, though they supposedly knew and freely admitted that the Sender was a reality, their whole life’s training, the whole acquired expertise of their respective fields, worked against that knowledge.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“Given that our civilization is unable to assimilate well even those concepts that originate in human heads when they appear outside its main current, although the creators of those concepts are, after all, children of the same age—how could we have assumed that we would be capable of understanding a civilization totally unlike ours, if it addressed us across the cosmic gulf?”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice