Stanisław Jerzy Lec

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Stanisław Jerzy Lec

Stanisław Jerzy Lec (6 March 1909 – 7 May 1966) (born de Tusch-Letz) was a Polish poet and aphorist.

According to Clifton Fadiman's introduction to Lec's book Unkempt Thoughts:

Lec has led the strange (to us), hunted, haunted life of thousands of Central European intellectuals, their experience inexorably shaped by war and revolution. At the outbreak of the war he was imprisoned in a German concentration camp. There he stayed until July 1943 when the camp was liquidated by mass executions. Escaping in a German uniform, he succeeded in reaching Warsaw where he joined the underground fighters. After the war he continued his writing, varying his career by brief service as cultural attache of the Polish Embassy in Vienna. He has also spent two years in Israel.

(The Embassy was Communist during the period of Stalinism in Poland, when the diplomats were carefully selected and controlled. Lec was a press attaché in Vienna. Then, he stayed in Israel, and at last returned to Poland in 1952. )

[edit] Lec's aphorisms

He who limps is still walking.
In a war of ideas it is people who get killed.
The mob shouts with one big mouth and eats with a thousand little ones.
Even a glass eye can see its blindness.
To whom should we marry Freedom, to make it multiply?
I am against using death as a punishment. I am also against using it as a reward.
You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories.
Optimists and pessimists differ only on the date of the end of the world.
Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork? (Hence the title Cannibals with Forks by John Elkington)
If a man who cannot count finds a four-leaf clover, is he lucky?
No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
All is in the hands of man. Therefore wash them often.
Do not ask God the way to heaven; he will show you the hardest one.
If you are not a psychiatrist, stay away from idiots. They are too stupid to pay a layman for his company.
Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man, but they don't bite everybody.
The first condition of immortality is death.
Suppose you succeed in breaking the wall with your head. And what, then, will you do in the next cell?