A Perfect Vacuum Quotes

“The chances that lose in the lottery of being are invisible”
― Stanisław Lem, A Perfect Vacuum

“One can, to be sure, program a digital machine in such a way as to be able to carry on a conversation with it, as if with an intelligent partner. The machine will employ, as the need arises, the pronoun “I” and all its grammatical inflections. This, however, is a hoax! The machine will still be closer to a billion chattering parrots—howsoever brilliantly trained the parrots be—than to the simplest, most stupid man. It mimics the behavior of a man on the purely linguistic plane and nothing more.”
― Stanisław Lem, A Perfect Vacuum

“Imagine for a moment that I attach to my BIX 310 092 an enormous auxiliary unit, which will be a ‘hereafter.’ One by one I let pass through the connecting channel and into the unit the ‘souls’ of my personoids, and there I reward those who believed in me, who rendered homage unto me, who showed me gratitude and trust, while all the others, the ‘ungodlies,’ to use the personoid vocabulary, I punish—e.g., by annihilation or else by torture. (Of eternal punishment I dare not even think—that much of a monster I am not!) My deed would undoubtedly be regarded as a piece of fantastically shameless egotism, as a low act of irrational vengeance—in sum, as the final villainy in a situation of total dominion over innocents. And these innocents will have against me the irrefutable evidence of logic, which is the aegis of their conduct.”
― Stanisław Lem, A Perfect Vacuum

“So, then, with respect to logic it must be thus: either the creation is perfect, in which case miracles are unnecessary, or the miracles are necessary, in which case the creation is not perfect.”
― Stanisław Lem, A Perfect Vacuum

“One must seriously doubt the story that Prometheus did not expect the vulture. It is far more likely, according to modern psychology, that it was entirely for the purpose of being pecked in the liver that he stole the fire of heaven. He was a masochist; masochism, like eye coloring, is an inborn trait and nothing to be ashamed of; one should matter-of-factly indulge it and utilize it for the good of society.”
― Stanisław Lem, A Perfect Vacuum

“He who, fond of beating, is beaten, is every bit as miserable as he who, desirous of a good thrashing, must himself—forced by circumstances—thrash others.”
― Stanisław Lem, A Perfect Vacuum

“Once we allow the logical reconstruction of something (a being, a theodicy, and the like) to have internal self contradiction, it obviously becomes possible to prove absolutely anything, whatever one pleases. Consider how the matter lies. We are speaking of creating someone and of endowing him with a particular logic, and then demanding that this same logic be offered up in sacrifice to a belief in the Maker of all things. If this model itself is to remain noncontradictory, it calls for the application, in the form of a metalogic, of a totally different type of reasoning from that which is natural to the logic of the one created. |If that does not reveal the outright imperfection of the Creator, then it reveals a quality that I would call mathematical inelegance – a sui generic unmethodicalness (incoherence) of the creative act.”
― Stanisław Lem, A Perfect Vacuum

“Once we allow the logical reconstruction of something (a being, a
theodicy, and the like) to have internal self contradiction, it obviously becomes possible
to prove absolutely anything, whatever one pleases. Consider how the matter lies. We are
speaking of creating someone and of endowing him with a particular logic, and then
demanding that this same logic be offered up in sacrifice to a belief in the Maker of all
things. If this model itself is to remain noncontradictory, it calls for the application, in the
form of a metalogic, of a totally different type of reasoning from that which is natural to
the logic of the one created. |If that does not reveal the outright imperfection of the
Creator, then it reveals a quality that I would call mathematical inelegance – a sui generic
unmethodicalness (incoherence) of the creative act.”
― Stanisław Lem, A Perfect Vacuum

“Książką można czytelnikowi głowę, owszem przemeblować o tyle, o ile jakieś meble już w niej przed lekturą stały.”
― Stanisław Lem, Doskonała próżnia. Wielkość urojona