Frank Herbert Quotes - Page 3

A single obscure decision of prophecy, perhaps the choice of one word over another, could change the entire aspect of the future. He tells us "The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.
Frank Herbert
The people who demand that the oracle predict for them really want to know next year’s price on whalefur or something equally mundane. None of them wants an instant-by-instant prediction of his personal life.
Frank Herbert
We had something few experience. We were joined in our strengths rather than in our weaknesses.
Frank Herbert
Each of us comes into being knowing who he is and what he is supposed to do.' ... 'Small children know,' Leto said. 'It's only after adults have confused them that children hide this knowledge even from themselves.
Frank Herbert
The child who refuses to travel in the father's harness, this is the symbol of man's most unique capability. "I do not have to be what my father was. I do not have to obey my father's rules or even believe everything he believed. It is my strength as a human that I can make my own choices of what to believe and what not to believe, of what to be and what not to be.
Frank Herbert
A ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel... he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men... a good ruler has to learn his world's language... it's different for every world... the language of the rocks and growing things... the language you don't hear just with your ears... the Mystery of Life... not a problem to solve, but a reality to experience... Understanding must move with the flow of the process.
Frank Herbert
I realize that humans cannot bear very much reality. Most lives are a flight from selfhood. Most prefer the truths of the stable. You stick your heads into the stanchions and munch contentedly until you die. Others use you for their purposes. Not once do you live outside the stable to lift your head and be your own creature. Muad'Dib came to tell you about that. Without understanding his message, you cannot revere him!
Frank Herbert
Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.
Frank Herbert
Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem. It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced — in a word, insane.
Frank Herbert
On Caladan, we ruled with sea and air power," the Duke said. "Here, we must scrabble for desert power. This is your inheritance, Paul.
Frank Herbert
One must always keep the tools of statecraft sharp and ready. Power and fear – sharp and ready.
Frank Herbert
Dune was a world of paradox now—a world under siege, yet the center of power. To come under siege, he decided, was the inevitable fate of power.
Frank Herbert
Deceit is a tool of statecraft," Irulan agreed."There are limits to power, as those who put their hopes in a constitution always discover," Paul said.
Frank Herbert
We are plagued by a corrupt polity which promotes unlawful and/or immoral behaviour. Public interest has no practical significance in everyday behaviour among the ruling factions. The real problems of our world are not being confronted by those in power. In the guise of public service, they use whatever comes to hand for personal gain. They are insane with and for power.
Frank Herbert
All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.
Frank Herbert
Constitutions become the ultimate tyranny," Paul said. "They’re organized power on such a scale as to be overwhelming. The constitution is social power mobilized and it has no conscience. It can crush the highest and the lowest, removing all dignity and individuality. It has an unstable balance point and no limitations.
Frank Herbert
Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect any who seek it.
Frank Herbert
If we deny the need for thought, Moneo, as some do, we lose the powers of reflection; we cannot define what our senses report. If we deny the flesh, we unwheel the vehicle which bears us. But if we deny emotion, we lose all touch with our internal universe. It was emotions which I missed the most.
Frank Herbert
Three quick breaths triggered the responses: he fell into the floating awareness... focusing the consciousness... aortal dilation... avoiding the unfocused mechanism of consciousness... to be conscious by choice... blood enriched and swift-flooding the overload regions... one does not obtain food-safety freedom by instinct alone... animal consciousness does not extend beyond the given moment nor into the idea that its victims may become extinct... the animal destroys and does not produce... animal pleasures remain close to sensation levels and avoid the perceptual... the human requires a background grid through which to see his universe... focused consciousness by choice, this forms your grid... bodily integrity follows nerve-blood flow according to the deepest awareness of cell needs... all things/cells/beings are impermanent... strive for flow-permanence within...
Frank Herbert
Every civilization depends on the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness-- they cannot work and their civilization collapses
Frank Herbert
Education is no substitute for intelligence. That elusive quality is defined only in part by puzzle-solving ability. It is in the creation of new puzzles reflecting what your senses report that you round out the definition.
Frank Herbert
I never thought it would be easy to serve God," she said. "I just didn't think it would be this hard.
Frank Herbert
He uses the nice old words so rich in tradition to be sure I know he means it.
Frank Herbert
There are proven ways to win the loyalty of tough, strong, ferocious men: play on the certain knowledge of their superiority, the mystique of secret covenant, the esprit of shared suffering.
Frank Herbert
Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part on 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.
Frank Herbert
Delay is as dangerous as the wrong answer.
Frank Herbert
It doesn't follow that the riots mean permanent hostility toward him.
Frank Herbert
My son will wear the title well, the Duke thought, and realized with a sudden chill that this was another death thought.
Frank Herbert
I must rule with eye and claw — as the hawk among lesser birds. - Duke Leto Atreides
Frank Herbert
But oh, the perils of leadership in a species so anxious to be told what to do. How little they knew of what they created by their demands. Leaders made mistakes. And those mistakes, amplified by the numbers who followed without questioning, moved inevitably toward great disasters.
Frank Herbert
Give as few orders as possible," his father had told him once long ago. "Once you've given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.
Frank Herbert
Any man who retreats into a cave which has only one opening deserves to die.
Frank Herbert
Move slowly and the day of your revenge will come," Tuek said. "Speed is a device of Shaitan. Cool your sorrow–we’ve the diversions for it; three things there are that ease the heart–water, green grass, and the beauty of woman.
Frank Herbert
Create or arouse such unbridled forces and you built carnal fantasies of enormous complexity. You could lead whole populations around by their desires, by their fantasy projections.
Frank Herbert
Democracy is susceptible to being led astray by having scapegoats paraded in front of the electorate. Get the rich, the greedy, the criminals, the stupid leader and so on ad nauseam.
Frank Herbert
Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual. -Words of Muad'dib by Princess Irulan.
Frank Herbert
Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, absolute power attracts the corruptible.
Frank Herbert
Liberty and Freedom are complex concepts. They go back to religious ideas of Free Will and are related to the Ruler Mystique implicit in absolute monarchs. Without absolute monarchs patterned after the Old Gods and ruling by the grace of a belief in religious indulgence, Liberty and Freedom would never have gained their present meaning. These ideals owe their very existence to past examples of oppression. And the forces that maintain such ideas will erode unless renewed by dramatic teaching or new oppressions. This is the most basic key to my life.
Frank Herbert
Governments always commit their entire populations when the demands grow heavy enough. By their passive acceptance, these populations become accessories to whatever is done in their name.
Frank Herbert
It is far better to win a battle through skilled leadership and wise decisions than violence and bloodshed. It may not seem as glorious to the uninitiated, but in the end it results in fewer wounds--of any kind.
Frank Herbert
Military foolishness is ultimately suicidal. They believe that by risking death they pay the price of any violent behavior against enemies of their own choosing. They have the invader mentality, that false sense of freedom from responsibility for your own actions.
Frank Herbert
You have a nicety of awareness of the difference between a blade's edge and its tip.
Frank Herbert
motivating people, forcing them to your will, gives you a cynical attitude toward humanity. It degrades everything it touches.
Frank Herbert
The man without emotions is the one to fear.
Frank Herbert
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.
Frank Herbert
Face your fears or they will climb over your back.
Frank Herbert
Try looking into that place where you dare not look! You'll find me there, staring out at you!
Frank Herbert
Fear is the mind-killer.
Frank Herbert
Highly organized research is guaranteed to produce nothing new.
Frank Herbert
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
Highly organized research is guaranteed to produce nothing new.
Frank Herbert
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
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Frank Herbert
Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.
Frank Herbert
Proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you have always known.
Frank Herbert
One learns from books and example only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.
Frank Herbert
The Fremen have a simple, practical religion,” he said.“Nothing about religion is simple.
Frank Herbert
Some say," Scytale said, "that people cling to Imperial leadership because space is infinite. They feel lonely without a unifying symbol. For a lonely people, the Emperor is a definite place. They can turn toward him and say: 'See, there He is. He makes us one.' Perhaps religion serves the same purpose, m'Lord.
Frank Herbert
Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.
Frank Herbert
In 1054, the patriarch of Constantinople and the pope excommunicated each other. That was the end of holiness for both churches.
Frank Herbert