satirists-from-poland

"And she sat at dinner, oh, mature in her immaturity, self-confident, indifferent and alone, and I sat for her, for her, for her I sat and I could not for one second not sit for her, I was in her, she contained me in her along with my mockery, her tastes, her tastes were decisive for me and I could please myself only insofar as I pleased her."

"It's the end, what a gas, And who's read it is an ass!"

"Now come, mouths! No, I am not saying goodbye to you, strange and unknown faces of strangers, unknown men who will read me, I welcome you, I welcome you, graceful bundles of body parts, now let it begin - come and join me, start your smooching, give me a new face, so that I will have to run away from you again into other people and run, run, run through all of humanity. For there is no escape from a mouth except into another mouth, and the only way to escape from a man is into the embrace of another. There is no escape from the butt at all. Chase me if you want. I run away with my mouth in my hands."

"What's worse, the forest was green."

"Why does Słowacki arouse admiration and love in us? (…) Because, gentlemen, Słowacki was a great poet!"

"Without students, there would be no school, and without school, there would be no life!"

"Without students, there would be no school, and without school, there would be no teachers."

"I demand death homes where everyone would have modern means of easy death at their disposal. Where you could die smoothly, not by throwing yourself in front of a train or hanging yourself on a doorknob. Where a tired, worn-out, finished man could surrender himself to the friendly arms of a specialist so that he could be assured of a death without torture and disgrace. Why not, I ask, why not? Who stops you from civilizing death?"

"I have never needed God in my life - from my earliest childhood, not even for five minutes - I have always been self-sufficient."

"Monday - me, Tuesday - me, Wednesday - me, Thursday - me."

"You don't necessarily have to be a god to have followers."

"Autumn begins with mimosas Golden, fragile and nice It's you, you're that girl Which looked out into the street towards me. The hall smelled of your letters, when I came back from school out of breath, and on the streets in light autumn bright angels flew after me."

"Everyone kiss my ass."

"Life is torture. It's best not to be born at all. But this luck is one in a thousand."

"Please! Leave me for a second life, Like for a second year in the same class."

"Someday I'll be sad again I will come back to you again, Christ... I'm still going to cry so hard, That through my tears I will see you, Christ... And such great mourning I will complain to you, Christ... That my spirit will kneel before You And then my heart will break Christ..."

"Starożytni mawiali: 'mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur'. Świat łaknie oszustw, więc jest oszukiwany."

"A man who for an entire week does nothing but hit himself over the head has little reason to be proud."

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

"We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilisation superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us — that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence — then we don't like it any more."

"The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word."

"You are only a puppet. But you don't realize that you are."

"Any attempt to understand the motivation of these occurrences is blocked by our own anthropomorphism. Where there are no men, there cannot be motives accessible to men."

"Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding out what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed."

"Really, one of us ought to have the courage to call the experiment off and shoulder the responsibility for the decision, but the majority reckons that that kind of courage would be a sign of cowardice, and the first step in a retreat. They think it would mean an undignified surrender for mankind — as if there was any dignity in floundering and drowning in what we don't understand and never will."

"If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently."

"In a rocket a person can burst like a bubble, or solidify completely, or boil, or explode in a fountain of blood so quickly he doesn't have time to shout out, and then only his bones will be clattering against the metal, and they'll go on circling in Newtonian orbit with an Einsteinian adjustment, our rattles of progress! And we'll go willingly, because it's a beautiful journey, till we arrive, and in these cabins, over this tableware, amid the immortal dishwashers, with our serried ranks of faithful lockers, our devoted toilets, here is our fulfillment."

"Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him. Man can serve his age or rebel against it, but the target of his cooperation or rebellion comes to him from outside."

"Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child."

"The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that Finis vitae sed non amoris [Life ends but not love], is a lie, useless and not even funny."

"To replay human existence — fine, but to replay it in the way a drunk replays a corny tune, pushing coins over and over into the jukebox?"

"I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that remained. I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past."

"One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could build anything beginning with the letter 'n'."

"Take a good look at this world, how riddled it is with huge, gaping holes, how full of Nothingness, the Nothingness that fills the bottomless void between the stars, how everything about us has become lined with it, how it darkly lurks behind each shred of matter. This is your work, envious one! And I hardly think the future generations will bless you for it..."

"Come, let us hasten to a higher plane Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to n Commingled in an endless Markov chain! I'll grant thee random access to my heart, Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love; And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove, And in our bound partition never part. Cancel me not — for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain."

"He who has had, has been, but he who hasn't been, has been had."

"He who must be what he is, may curse his fate, but cannot change it; on the other hand, he who can transform himself has no one in the world but himself to blame for his failings, no one but himself to hold responsible for his dissatisfaction."

"Plenitude, when too plenitudinous, was worse than destitution, for — obviously — what could one do, if there was nothing one could not?"

"Each civilization may choose one of two roads to travel, that is, either fret itself to death, or pet itself to death. And in the course of doing one or the other, it eats its way into the Universe, turning cinders and flinders of stars into toilet seats, pegs, gears, cigarette holders and pillowcases, and it does this because, unable to fathom the Universe, it seeks to change that Fathomlessness into Something Fathomable."

"If you should be afflicted with a hump, for example, but firmly believe the Almighty somehow needs your hump to realize His Cosmic Design and that it was therefore or­dained along with the rest of Creation, why, then you may be easily reconciled to your deformity. If, however, they tell you that it's merely the result of a misplaced molecule, an atom or two that happened to go the wrong way, then noth­ing remains for you but to bay at the moon."

"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."

"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. No matter how much genuine strength it may contain, there is also, inevitably, a considerable part that is only the pretense of that strength."

"It is no coincidence, I am sure, that those who have the most to say about the Project are the ones who have had no direct contact with it. Which is similar to the attitude physicists have regarding gravitation or electrons — as opposed to that of the "well-informed" who read popular science. The "well-informed" think they know something about matters that the experts are reluctant to 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."

"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 is drowned out by 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?"

"Man's quest for knowledge is an expanding series whose limit is infinity, but philosophy seeks to attain that limit at one blow, by a short circuit providing the certainty of complete and inalterable truth. Science meanwhile advances at its gradual pace, often slowing to a crawl, and for periods it even walks in place, but eventually it reaches the various ultimate trenches dug by philosophical thought, and, quite heedless of the fact that it is not supposed to be able to cross those final barriers to the intellect, goes right on."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"What would happen to us if we could truly sympathize with others, feel with them, suffer for them? The fact that human anguish, fear, and suffering melt away with the death of the individual, that nothing remains of the ascents, the declines, the orgasms, and the agonies, is a praiseworthy gift of evolution, which made us like the animals. If from every unfortunate, from every victim, there remained even a single atom of his feelings, if thus grew the inheritance of the generations, if even a spark could pass from man to man, the world would be full of raw, bowel-torn howling."

"A smart machine will first consider which is more worth its while: to perform the given task or, instead, to figure some way out of it. Whichever is easier. And why indeed should it behave otherwise, being truly intelligent? For true intelligence demands choice, internal freedom. And therefore we have the malingerants, fudgerators, and drudge-dodgers, not to mention the special phenomenon of simulimbecility or mimicretinism. A mimicretin is a computer that plays stupid in order, once and for all, to be left in peace. And I found out what dissimulators are: they simply pretend that they're not pretending to be defective. Or perhaps it's the other way around. The whole thing is very complicated. A probot is a robot on probation, while a servo is one still serving time. A robotch may or may not be a sabot. One vial, and my head is splitting with information and nomenclature. A confuter, for instance, is not a confounding machine — that's a confutator — but a machine which quotes Confucius. A grammus is an antiquated frammus, a gidget — a cross between a gadget and a widget, usually flighty. A bananalog is an analog banana plug. Contraputers are loners, individualists, unable to work with others; the friction these types used to produce on the grid team led to high revoltage, electrical discharges, even fires. Some get completely out of hand — the dynamoks, the locomoters, the cyberserkers."