Frank Herbert Quotes - Page 4

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.
Frank Herbert
But it's well known that repression makes a religion flourish.
Frank Herbert
Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, 'I am not the kind of person I want to be.' It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.
Frank Herbert
They are not mad. They're trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.
Frank Herbert
When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong - faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late.
Frank Herbert
The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.
Frank Herbert
There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.
Frank Herbert
Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.
Frank Herbert
the meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture - it begins in the dignity with which we treat the dead
Frank Herbert
There is only one true wealth in all the universe--living time.
Frank Herbert
The flesh surrenders itself. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not...yet, I occurred.
Frank Herbert
I am not the river I am the net.
Frank Herbert
Education is no substitute for intelligence.
Frank Herbert
My father once told me that respect for truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. 'Something cannot emerge from nothing,' he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable 'the truth' can be.
Frank Herbert
Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.
Frank Herbert
Irreverence is a most necessary ingredient of religion. Not to speak of its importance in philosophy. Irreverence is the only way left to us for testing our universe.
Frank Herbert
To be a god can ultimately become boring and degrading. There'd be reason enough for the invention of free will! A god might wish to escape into sleep and be alive only in the unconscious projections of his dream-creatures.
Frank Herbert
The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it.
Frank Herbert
Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class -- whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
Frank Herbert
Guilt starts as a feeling of failure.
Frank Herbert
Whether a thought is spoken or not it is a real thing and it has power," Tuek said. "You might find the line between life and death among the Fremen to be too sharp and quick.
Frank Herbert
The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.
Frank Herbert
There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors.
Frank Herbert