Frank Herbert Quotes - Page 2

Don't sit with your back to any doors.
Frank Herbert
When we encounter personal problems, those things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan.
Frank Herbert
When strangers meet, great allowances should be made for differences in custom and training.
Frank Herbert
Whether a thought is spoken or not, it is a real thing and has powers of reality.
Frank Herbert
He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future. Things persisted in not being what they seemed.
Frank Herbert
He learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.
Frank Herbert
Life produces a different taste each time you take it.
Frank Herbert
The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.' And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning, 'That path leads ever down into stagnation.
Frank Herbert
Government cannot be religious and self-assertive at the same time. Religious experience needs a spontaneity which laws inevitably suppress. And you cannot govern without laws. Your laws eventually must replace morality, replace conscience, replace even the religion by which you think to govern. Sacred ritual must spring from praise and holy yearnings which hammer out a significant morality. Government, on the other hand, is a cultural organism particularly attractive to doubts, questions and contentions. I see the day coming when ceremony must take the place of faith and symbolism replaces morality.
Frank Herbert
In their passion for sameness, the tyrants made themselves more and more powerful. All others grew correspondingly weaker and weaker. New bureaus and directorates, odd ministries, leaped into existence for the most improbable purposes. These became the citadels of a new aristocracy, rulers who kept the giant wheel of government careening along, spreading destruction, violence, and chaos wherever they touched.
Frank Herbert
There exists a limit to the force even the most powerful may apply without destroying themselves. Judging this limit is the true artistry of government. Misuse of power is the fatal sin. The law cannot be a tool of vengeance, never a hostage, nor a fortification against the martyrs it has created. You cannot threaten any individual and escape the consequences.
Frank Herbert
Safaris through ancestral memories teach me many things. The patterns, ahhh, the patterns. Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me the most. I distrust extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It's true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who from such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of course, all bureaucracies follow this pattern, but what a hypocrisy to find this even under a communized banner.
Frank Herbert
Once . . . long ago, he’d thought of himself as an inventor of government. But the invention had fallen into old patterns. It was like some hideous contrivance with plastic memory. Shape it any way you wanted, but relax for a moment, and it snapped into the ancient forms. Forces at work beyond his reach in human breasts eluded and defied him.
Frank Herbert
Good governance never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.
Frank Herbert
He's taking the change well?" She asked.Except for getting a bit overtired. He's excited, but what 15-year-old wouldn't be under these circumstances?
Frank Herbert
Does a population have informed consent when that population is not taught the inner workings of its monetary system, and then is drawn, all unknowing, into economic adventures?
Frank Herbert
There are many degrees of sight and many degrees of blindness. What senses do we lack that we cannot see another world all around us?
Frank Herbert
I warn you that ignorance thrives on hysteria.
Frank Herbert
Money said, "I warn you that ignorance thrives on hysteria.
Frank Herbert
Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.
Frank Herbert
I come only to ask a simple question. Is Muad'Dib's death to be followed by the moral suicide of all men? Is that the inevitable aftermath of a Messiah?
Frank Herbert
The test of a man isn’t what you think he’ll do. It’s what he actually does.
Frank Herbert
How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.
Frank Herbert
No matter how much we ask after the truth, self-awareness is often unpleasant. We do not feel kindly toward the Truthsayer.
Frank Herbert
It has occurred to me more than once that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.
Frank Herbert
I don't speak, I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own.
Frank Herbert
You can not go on forever stealing what you need without regard to those who come after.
Frank Herbert
Most discipline is hidden discipline, designed not to liberate but to limit. Do not ask Why? Be cautious with How? Why? leads inexorably to paradox. How? traps you in a universe of cause and effect. Both deny the infinite.
Frank Herbert
They compose poems to their knives.
Frank Herbert
I am a leg of the death tripod that will destroy our foes.
Frank Herbert
He who controls the spice controls the universe.
Frank Herbert
Then she said a good ruler has to learn his world’s language, that it’s different for every world. And I thought she meant they didn’t speak Galach on Arrakis, but she said that wasn’t it at all. She said she meant the language of the rocks and growing things, the language you don’t hear just with your ears. And I said that’s what Dr. Yueh calls the Mystery of Life.” Hawat chuckled. “How’d that sit with her?” “I think she got mad. She said the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience. So I quoted the First Law of Mentat at her: 'A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.
Frank Herbert
Black is a blind remembering, she thought. You listen for pack sounds, for the cries of those who hunted your ancestors in a past so ancient only your most primitive cells remember. The ears see. The nostrils see.
Frank Herbert
The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called "spannungsbogen" -- which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.
Frank Herbert
Paul looked down at the hand that had known pain, and then up to the Reverend Mother. The sound of her voice contained a difference than from any other voicing his experience. The words were outlined in brilliance. There was an edge to them.
Frank Herbert
Only fools prefer the past!
Frank Herbert
Every man carries his own past with him," Hayt said.
Frank Herbert
People always want something more than immediate joy or that deeper sense called happiness. This is one of the secrets by which we shape the fulfillment of our designs. The something more assumes amplified power with people who cannot give it a name or who (most often the case) do not even suspect its existence. Most people only react unconsciously to such hidden forces. Thus, we have only to call a calculated something more into existence, define it and give it shape, then people will follow.
Frank Herbert
Small souls who seek power over others first destroy the faith those others might have in themselves.
Frank Herbert
Growth is limited by the necessity which is present in the least amount. And naturally, the least favorable condition controls the growth rate
Frank Herbert
Humans are almost always lonely.
Frank Herbert
This wise man observed that wealth is a tool of freedom. But the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.
Frank Herbert
When a Truthsayer's gifted by the drug, she can look many places in her memory - in her body's memory. We look down so many avenues of the past... but only feminine avenues... Yet there's a place no Truthsayer can see. We are repelled by it, terrorized. It is said a man will come one day and find in the gift of the drug his inward eye. He will look where we cannot - into both feminine and masculine pasts... Many men have tried the drug... so many, but none has succeeded.""They tried and failed, all of them?""They tried and died.
Frank Herbert
CHOAM is business and business follows profits.
Frank Herbert
What you of the CHOAM directorate seem unable to understand is that you seldom find real loyalties in commerce ... Men must want to do things of their own innermost drives. People, not commercial organisations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work, every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you overorganize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness — they cannot work and their civilization collapses.
Frank Herbert
Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place.
Frank Herbert
Fannie Mae had aroused his anger, then reduced his anger to verbal breast-beating, and finally to silent hurt. Still, the love remained. Why?
Frank Herbert
We accept too damned many things on the explanations of people who could have good reasons for lying.
Frank Herbert
But one learns from books and reels only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.
Frank Herbert
We can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn.
Frank Herbert
He felt the inability to grieve as a terrible flaw.
Frank Herbert
To accept a little death is worse than death itself.
Frank Herbert
Do actions agree with words? There's your measure of reliability. Never confine yourself to the words.
Frank Herbert
Dangers lurk in all systems. Systems incorporate the unexamined beliefs of their creators. Adopt a system, accept its beliefs, and you help strengthen the resistance to change
Frank Herbert
My Uncle Malky always said the Lord Leto never responded to prayer. He said the Lord Leto looked on prayer as attempted coercion, a form of violence against the chosen god, telling the immortal what to do: Give me a miracle, God, or I won't believe in you!
Frank Herbert
The great mass of humankind possesses an unmistakable unit-identity. It can be one thing. It can act as a single organism.
Frank Herbert
At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers. Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play. For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events. If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order.
Frank Herbert
Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent mutual regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it.
Frank Herbert
I'm going to rub your faces in things you try to avoid. I don't find it strange that all you want to believe is only that which comforts you. How else do humans invent the traps which betray us into mediocrity? How else do we define cowardice?
Frank Herbert
It is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past.
Frank Herbert