Stanislaw Lem Quotes

Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him.

For the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashion of our garments, depend on where we were born. We are molded and fashioned by our surroundings.

It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political, and moral beliefs that control our actions.

I've always been curious in why different people believe the things they do and do the things they do - in the different ways that people live.

God, from whose territory I had withdrawn my ambassadors at the age of fourteen. It had become obvious that he was never going to do a thing I said.

I have not said your values are wrong. But neither are they right. They are simply judgments. Assessments. Decisions. For the most part, they are decisions made not by you, but by someone else. Your parents, perhaps. Your religion. Your teachers, historians, politicians.

The reflection of the current social paradigm tells us we are largely determined by conditioning and conditions.

The Holy Ghost carries on the whole Christian system in this earth. Not a Baptism, not a Marriage, not a Sacrament can be administered but by the Holy Ghost... There is no Authority civil or religious: there can be no legitimate Government but what is administered by this Holy Ghost. There can be no salvation without it. All, without it is Rebellion and Perdition, or in more orthodox words Damnation.

We are born into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed. . . . We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist's maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action.

Most of us are taught from an early age to pay far more attention to signals coming from other people than from within. We are encouraged to ignore our own needs and wants and to concentrate on living up to others expectations.

It is still bad taste to be an avowed atheist. But now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian.

No one can control his own opinion or his own belief. My belief was forced upon me by my surroundings. I am the product of all circumstances that have in any way touched me.

What humanity abhors, custom reconciles and recommends to us.

We are what we have been told about ourselves. We are the sum of the messages we have received. The true messages. The false messages.

Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.

God determines how fast you're going to run; I can help only with the mechanics.

The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations.

The devil gives the best first and the worst last, but the Lord saves the best for last.

All information of a spiritual or personal nature will have to come from our father, who art in heaven, and I think he's in New York right now.

Everyone in the world was programmed by the place they were born, hemmed in by their beliefs, but you had to at least try to grow your own brain.

When was the last time you had a thought that wasn't put there by THEM?

I hated myself totally white. So now I cheat. It's my white hair, and I put color there. My grandson says I'm punk.

Minds are cluttered from the age of six with the values of others-values which bear little relation to their own private capacities, needs and desires.

Look what is happening in the world - we are being conditioned by society, by the culture we live in, and that culture is the product of man. There is nothing holy, or divine, or eternal about culture.