“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, quote from Children of Dune
“The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
“The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
“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, quote from Children of Dune
“The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires. Thus always the human condition faces a beautifully empty canvas. We possess only this moment in which to dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence which we share and create.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
“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, quote from Children of Dune
“One learns from books and example only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
“To know a thing well, know it's limits; Only when pushed beyond it's tolerance will it's true nature be seen.
-The Amtal Rule”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
“Most deadly errors arise from obsolete assumptions.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
“If you focus your awareness only upon your own rightness, then you invite the forces of opposition to overwhelm you.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
“You aren't thinking or really existing unless you're willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgement of your existence.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
“When I am Weaker Thn You, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your Freedom Because that is according to my principles.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
“If all those around you believe some particular thing, you will soon be tempted to share in that belief.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
“Often I must Speak otherwise than I Think. This is Called Diplomacy.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
“One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
“Every judgment teeters on the brink of error,” Leto explained. “To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
“Abandon certainty! That's life's deepest command. That's what life's all about. We're a probe into the unknown, into the uncertain. Why can't you hear Muad'Dib? If certainty is knowing absolutely an absolute future, then that's only death disguised! Such a future becomes now!”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
“There are illusions of popular history which a successful religion must promote: Evil men never prosper; only the brave deserve the fair; honesty is the best policy; actions speak louder than words; virtue always triumphs; a good deed is its own reward; any bad human can be reformed; religious talismans protect one from demon possession; only females understand the ancient mysteries; the rich are doomed to unhappiness.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
“To exist is to stand out, away from the background," The Preacher said. "You aren't thinking or really existing unless you're willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgment of your existence.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
“We’ve lost something vital, I tell you. When we lost it, we lost the ability to make good decisions. We fall upon decisions these days the way we fall upon an enemy—or wait and wait, which is a form of giving up, and we allow the decisions of others to move us. Have we forgotten that we were the ones who set this current flowing?”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
“Ambitions tend to Remain undisturbed by Realities.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
“If you put away those who report accurately, you’ll keep only those who know what you want to hear. I can think of nothing more poisonous than to rot in the stink of your own reflections.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
“If I always behave with propriety, no matter what it costs me to suppress my own desires, then that is the measure of me. Such is the essence of self-control.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
“you've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap. there's an animal kind of trick. a human would remain in the trap endure the pain feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
“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, quote from Children of Dune
“I cannot lie to you any more than I could lie to myself,” Paul said. “I know this. Every man should have such an auditor.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
“We know the major conditions wherein this large populace may turn upon its keepers -
One: When they find a leader. This is the most volatile threat to the powerful; they must retain control of leaders.
Two: When the populace recognises its chains. Keep the populace blind and unquestioning.
Three: When the populace perceives a hope of escape from bondage. They must never even believe that escape is possible!”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
“But one learns from books and reels only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
“Knowing was a barrier which prevented learning.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Children of Dune
Frank Herbert
Born place: in Tacoma, Washington, The United States
Born date October 8, 1920
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“You're a monster that mothers threaten children with and you're still touchy as an ugly girl in a pretty dress.”
― Caitlin Kittredge, quote from The Iron Thorn
“The city which lay below was a charnel house built on multi-layered bones centuries older than those which lay beneath the cities of Hamburg or Dresden. Was this knowledge part of the mystery it held for her, a mystery felt most strongly on a bell-chimed Sunday on her solitary exploration of its hidden alleys and squares? Time had fascinated her from childhood, its apparent power to move at different speeds, the dissolution it wrought on minds and bodies, her sense that each moment, all moments past and those to come, were fused into an illusory present which with every breath became the unalterable, indestructible past. In the City of London these moments were caught and solidified in stone and brick, in churches and monuments and in bridges which spanned the grey-brown ever-flowing Thames. She would walk out in spring or summer as early as six o'clock, double-locking the front door behind her, stepping into a silence more profound and mysterious than the absence of noise. Sometimes in this solitary perambulation it seenmed that her own footsteps were muted, as if some part of her were afraid to waken the dead who had walked thse streets and had known the same silence.”
― P.D. James, quote from The Private Patient
“And yet it had come to this: a cult that followed a dogmatic hard line of exclusion and repression, believed its teachings alone were the way that others must follow, and claimed special knowledge of something that had happened more than five centuries ago. It did nothing to soften its rigid stance, nothing to heal wounds that it had helped to create by deliberately shunning people of other Races, and nothing to explore the possibility of other beliefs. It held its ground even in the face of hard evidence that perhaps it had misjudged and refused to consider that it was courting a danger that might destroy everyone. p96”
― Terry Brooks, quote from Bearers of the Black Staff
“I swayed between fear, defiance, and nausea, and was wholly the prey of my passion. I could not and did not want to listen to the depths. But on the seventh night, the spirit of the depths spoke to me: “Look into your depths, pray to your depths, waken the dead.”
― C.G. Jung, quote from The Red Book: Liber Novus
“The word 'glamour' comes from the word 'grammar', and since the Chomskyan revolution the etymology has been fitting. Who could not be dazzled by the creative power of the mental grammar, by its ability to convey an infinite number of thoughts with a finite set of rules?”
― Steven Pinker, quote from The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
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