“Either something is authentic or it is unauthentic, it is either false or true, make-believe or spontaneous life; yet here we are faced with a prevaricated truth and an authentic fake, hence a thing that is at once the truth and a lie.”
"Gruppenführer Louis XVI", in A Perfect Vacuum (1971), tr. Michael Kandel (1978)
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Stanisław Lem 74
Polish science fiction author 1921–2006Related quotes

Raymond, p. 373 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t80k3mq4s;view=1up;seq=415
Raymond, or Life and Death (1916)

“Spontaneity is the privilege of an authentic person.”
Original: La spontaneità è il privilegio di una persona autentica.
Source: prevale.net
Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.31 ,[ellipsis added]

Interview https://elpais.com/elpais/2018/02/27/inenglish/1519736544_699462.html, El País, 27/02/2018

“Humanity is not yet ready for either real truth or real harmony.”
Nationally syndicated column number 31, A Few Shots of Scopolamin (15 July 1923), after meeting Robert E. House, who had proposed the use of scopolamine as a truth serum, in The Use of Scopolamine in Criminology (1922).
Weekly columns
Context: See they conducted experiments on convicts... I don't know on what grounds they reason a man in jail is a bigger liar than one out of jail... The chances are telling the truth is what got him there... It would be a big aid to humanity, but it will never be, for already the politicians are up in arms against it... It would wreck the very foundation on which our political government is run... If you ever injected truth into politics you'd have no politics … Even the ministers are denouncing it now … Humanity is not yet ready for either real truth or real harmony.
“Sentences are not as such either true or false”
Austin (1962) Sense and Sensibilia p. 111.