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

“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

“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

“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

“But ignorance, while it checks the enthusiasm of the sensible, in no way restrains the fools;”
― 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

“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

“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

“Literature, from the very beginning, has had a single enemy, and that is the restriction of the expressed idea. 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

“The “well-informed” think they know something about matters that the experts are reluctant even to speak of. Information at second hand always gives an impression of tidiness, in contrast with the data at the scientist’s disposal, full of gaps and uncertainties.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“we imagine Him sadistic not because He made us that way, but because we are ourselves that way.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“I remember only the deep sense of injury, the anger, and the disappointment that came upon me some years later, when it turned out that a head filled with wickedness would never, not in any place nor in any company, be struck by lightning; that breaking free of and not participating in the Proper brought with it no—absolutely no—punishment. If it is at all possible to speak thus of a child of less than ten, I wanted that lightning or some other form of dire retribution; I summoned it, challenged it, and grew to despise the world, the place of my existence, because it had demonstrated the futility of all action and thought, evil included.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

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

“Science is the part of culture that rubs against the world.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“The satisfaction with which you parade your proof of the lottery origin of human nature is not pure. It is, besides the joy of knowledge, a pleasure in befouling that which others consider lovely and hold dear.”
― 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

“With the demise of imagination I inherited its residue, a kind of permanent disagreement with reality, more like an anger, though, than a rejection. My laughter had already been a denial, and a more effective kind, perhaps, than suicide.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“What we hold to be the result of a malign intervention could only make sense as an ordinary miscalculation, as an error, but now we find ourselves in the realm of nonexistent theologies—that is, theologies of fallible gods.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

“The urge to destruction is deducible from thermodynamics. Life is a fraud, an attempt at enbezzlement, 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 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 –non 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 to the extent that they can be ruined. Not ethics but physics determines this law.”
― Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice