Talk:Frank Herbert/Archived Quotes

Moved Quotes Section

The following quotes were previosuly removed from the Frank Herbert article; the related discussion is here:article here: Talk:Frank Herbert#Dune Saga Quotes. TAnthony 21:19, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Dune (novel)

The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows - a wall against the wind.

A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

If wishes were fishes we'd all cast nets.

What is the son but an extension of the father?

It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.

Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.

There is probably no more terrible an instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man - with human flesh.

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.

Laboratory evidence tends to blind us to a very simple fact... That fact is this: we are dealing here with matters that originated and exist out-of-doors where plants and animals carry on their normal existence.

Do you wrestle with dreams? Do you contend with shadows? Do you move in a kind of sleep? Time has slipped away. Your life is stolen. You tarried with trifles, Victim of your folly.

There should be a science of discontent.

Parting with people is a sadness; a place is only a place.

The mind goes on working no matter how we try to hold it back.

Black is blind remembering... 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.

...respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.

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 me I will turn to see fear's path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

What do you despise? By this are you truly known.

And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life - we went soft, we lost our edge.

I find myself enjoying the quiet here.

The mind can go either direction under stress - toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.

The real wealth of a planet is in its landscape, how we take part in that basic source of civilization - agriculture.

Beginnings are such delicate times.

The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called "spannungsbogen" - which is the self-imposed delay between the desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.

Bribes are dangerous; they have a way of growing larger and larger.

The young reed dies so easily.

When your opponent fears you, then's the moment when you give the fear its own rein, give it the time to work on him. Let it become terror. The terrified man fights himself. Eventually, he attacks in desperation. That is the most dangerous moment, but the terrified man can be trusted usually to make a fatal mistake.

The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture - it begins in the dignity with which we treat our dead.

The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.

Its easier to be terrified by an enemy you admire.

To accept a little death is worse than death itself.

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.

There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace - those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of a creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death.

When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement becomes headlong - faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late.

You cannot avoid the interplay of politics within an orthodox religion. This power struggle permeates the training, educating, and disciplining of the orthodox community. Because of this pressure, the leaders of such a community inevitably must face that ultimate internal question: to succumb to complete opportunism as the price of maintaining their rule, or risk sacrificing themselves for the sake of the orthodox ethic.

When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual.

How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.

All men beneath your position covet your station.

Prophets have a way of dying by violence.

Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.

...the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.

Each man is a little war.

Religion often partakes of the myth of progress that shields us from the terrors of an uncertain future.

If a child, an untrained person, an ignorant person, or an insane person incites trouble, it is the fault of authority for not predicting and preventing that trouble.

Kindness is the beginning of cruelty.

From Dune Messiah -

I can only die once.

There exists no separation between gods and men; one blends softly casual into the other.

The future is a thing to be shaped.

Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.

To use raw power is to make yourself infinitely vulnerable to greater powers.

The universe is unfinished, you know.

You don't back people into a corner... Not if you want them to remain peaceful.

Consistency isn't a necessary aspect of the universe.

There are limits to power, as those who put their hopes in a constitution always discover.

Evil can be detected by its smell.

Ideas are most feared when they become actions.

Truth suffers from too much analysis.

...we consider the various worlds as gene pools, sources of teachings and teachers, sources of the possible. Our goal is not to rule, but to tap these gene pools, to learn, and to free ourselves from all the restraints imposed by dependency and government.

Power tends to isolate those who hold too much of it. Eventually, they lose touch with reality... and fall.

What religion and self-interest cannot hide, governments can.

...to endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe.

Is there a final answer? Doesn't each solution produce new questions?

Men always fear things which move by themselves.

You comfort me with thorns.

You do not beg the sun for mercy.

One moment of incompetence can be fatal.

When a creature has developed into one thing, he will choose death rather than change into his opposite.

...power deluded those who used it. One tended to believe power could overcome any barrier... including one's own ignorance.

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?

When you awaken, the first light shows you the new world - all fresh and ready for your tracks.

You can't stop a mental epidemic... It's overwhelmingly contagious.

Because we cannot imagine a thing, that doesn't exclude it from reality.

No matter how exotic human civilization becomes, no matter the developments of life and society nor the complexity of the machine / human interface, there always come interludes of lonely power when the course of humankind, the very future of humankind, depends upon the relatively simple actions of single individuals.

Every minute we linger...prolongs the present.

The hearts of all men dwell in the same wilderness.

It is so clear it is difficult to see.

...there is nothing firm, nothing balanced, nothing durable in all the universe - that nothing remains in its state, that each day, sometimes each hour, brings change.

War is useful because it is effective in so many areas. It stimulates the metabolism. It enforces government. It diffuses genetic strains. It possesses a vitality such as nothing else in the universe. Only those who recognize the value of war and exercise it have any degree of self-determination.

Only gods can risk perfection... It's a dangerous thing for a man.

When you stumble...you may regain your balance by jumping beyond the thing that tripped you.

You cannot threaten any individual and escape the consequences.

There are problems in this universe for which there are no answers.

Love knows love.

From Children of Dune

...humankind is still evolving, in a process which will never end...this evolution moves on changing principles which are known only to eternity.

Failure to make a decision is in itself a decision.

Too much knowledge never makes for simple decisions.

Among the responsibilities of command is the necessity to punish... but only when the victim demands it.

...one observes the survivors and learns from them.

The haughty do but build castle walls behind which they try to hide their doubts and fears.

Balance... It's what distinguishes a people from a mob.

An army...is composed of disposable, completely replaceable parts.

Even love can’t protect us from unwanted facts.

The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth.

A victory is useless unless it reflects your deepest wishes.

The joy of living, its beauty is all bound up in the fact that life can surprise you.

Power attracts the psychotics. Always.

A man’s religion is his own affair.

One discovers the future in the past, and both are part of a whole.

Advice...is a dangerous commodity.

Governments may rise and fall for reasons which appear insignificant. What small events! An argument between two women...which way the wind blows on a certain day...a sneeze, a cough, the length of a garment or the chance collision of a fleck of sand and a courtier's eye. It is not always the majestic concerns of Imperial ministers which dictate the course of history, nor is it necessarily the pontifications of priests which move the hands of God.

Ambitions tend to remain undisturbed by realities.

A universe of surprises is what I pray for!

Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and perpetrator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself - a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits the future atrocities thus bred.

Short-term expediency always fails in the long term.

To be sighted in the land of the blind carries its own perils. If you try to interpret what you see for the blind, you tend to forget that the blind possess an inherent movement conditioned by their blindness.

Change was dangerous. Invention must be suppressed. Individual willpower must be denied. What other function did the priesthood serve than to deny individual will?

Just as individuals are born, mature, breed, and die, so do societies and civilizations and governments.

To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror; to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.

When you try the hardest, just then, you most often fail.

Good government never depends on 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.

Our civilization could well die of indifference within it before succumbing to external attack.

Often I speak otherwise than I think...This is called diplomacy.

How seductive it is to live in peace.

This is the fallacy of power: ultimately it is effective only in an absolute, a limited universe. But the basic lesson of our relativistic universe is that things change. Any power must always meet a greater power.

One cannot have a single thing without its opposite.

If you focus your awareness only upon your own rightness, then you invite the forces of opposition to overwhelm you.

To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim.

Philosophy should be approached with irreverence.

When we think we know something, that’s precisely the moment when we should look deeper into the thing.

In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words. From witch doctor to priest to bureaucrat it is all the same. A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things, to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding - symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local interpretation of sanity. Symbol-secrecy of this form leads to the development of fragmented sub-languages, each being a symbol that its users are accumulating some form of power.

It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma.

...tomorrow has not yet happened and may never happen. This moment here is the only observable time and place for us in our universe. I tell you to savor this moment and understand what it teaches.

...humans cannot bear very much reality.

To exist is to stand out, away from the background...You aren’t thinking or really existing unless you’re willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgment of your existence.

The one-eyed view of our universe says you must not look far afield for problems. Such problems may never arrive. Instead, tend to the wolf within your fences. The packs ranging outside may not even exist.

...one peels a problem like an onion.

In human affairs, nothing remains enduring; all human affairs revolve in a helix, moving around and out.

There’s unknown all around at every moment. That’s where you seek knowledge.

If you believe certain words, you believe their hidden arguments. When you believe something is right or wrong, true or false, you believe the assumptions in the words which express the arguments. Such assumptions are often full of holes, but remain most precious to the convinced.

In doing good, avoid notoriety; in doing evil, avoid self-awareness.

The malady of indifference is what destroys many things...even civilizations die of it.

...there is nothing firm, nothing balanced, nothing durable in all the universe - that nothing remains in its state, that each day, some time each hour, brings change.

Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

Life requires dispute.

The universe can be understood only by the wind.

Beware paths which narrow future possibilities. Such paths divert you from infinity into lethal traps.

In the open land, one direction is as good as any.

Every question, every problem doesn’t have a single correct answer.

This is a changing universe and we are the strangest change of all.

Natural selection has been described as an environment selectively screening for those who will have progeny. Where humans are concerned, though, this is an extremely limiting viewpoint. Reproduction by sex tends toward experiment and innovation. It raises many questions, including the ancient one about whether an environment is a selective agent after the variation occurs, or whether environment plays a pre-selective role in determining the variations which it screens.

Religion is the emulation of the adult by the child. Religion is the encystment of past beliefs: mythology, which is guesswork, the hidden assumptions of trust in the universe, those pronouncements which men have made in search of personal power, all of it mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always the ultimate unspoken commandment is ‘Thou shall not question!’ But we question. We break that commandment as a matter of course. The work to which we have set ourselves is the liberating of the imagination, the harnessing of imagination to humankind’s deepest sense of creativity.

Peace demands solutions, but we never reach living solutions; we only work toward them. A fixed solution is, by definition, a dead solution.

Life is a mask through which the universe expresses itself. We assume that all of humankind and its supportive life forms represent a natural community and that the fate of all life is at stake in the fate of the individual.

The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires.

Men must want to do things out of their own innermost drives. People, not commercial organizations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work. Every civilization depends upon 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.

The surest way to keep a secret is to make people believe they already know the answer. People don’t ask questions then.

...humans can endure only in a fraternity of social justice.

Limits of survival are set by climate, those long drifts of change which a generation may fail to notice. And it is the extremes of climate which set the pattern. Lonely, finite humans may observe climatic provinces, fluctuations of annual weather and, occasionally may observe such things as ‘This is a colder year than I’ve ever known.’ Such things are sensible. But humans are seldom alerted to the shifting average through a great span of years. And it is precisely in this alerting that humans learn how to survive on any planet. They must learn climate.

...there’s no need to tear off an arm to remove a splinter.

Any path which narrows future possibilities may become a lethal trap. Humans are not threading their way through a maze; they scan a vast horizon filled with unique opportunities. The narrowing viewpoint of the maze should appeal only to creatures with their noses buried in sand.

To be a god can ultimately become boring and degrading. There’d be reason enough for the invention of free will!

Freedom is a lonely state.

Let the future happen of itself...The only rule for governing creativity is the act of creation itself.

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.

The assumption that a whole system can be made to work better through an assault on its conscious elements betrays a dangerous ignorance. This has often been the ignorant approach of those who call themselves scientists and technologists.

He speaks of death because that’s necessary...It’s a tension by which the living know they’re alive...The memory will persist as long as there’s a single human living...We always arise from our own ashes. Always.

There’s always a prevailing mystique in any civilization...It builds itself as a barrier against change, and that always leaves future generations unprepared for the universe’s treachery. All mystiques are the same in building these barriers - the religious mystique, the hero-leader mystique, the messiah mystique, the mystique of science/technology, and the mystique of nature itself.

It is time humans learned once more to live in their instincts.

From God Emperor of Dune

Chance is the nature of our universe.

Mischief is a most profound pleasure. It’s in the ways we deal with mischief that we sharpen creativity.

... there is little difference between the police mind and the military mind.

Radicals are only to be feared when you try to suppress them.

Radicals always see matters in terms which are too simple - black and white, good and evil, them and us. By addressing complex matters in that way, they can rip open a passage for chaos. The art of government as you call it, is the mastery of chaos.

When the myth dies, the government dies.

In its guts, the Army knows it is the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. It unleashes technology and never again can the magic be stuffed back into the bottle.

Technology breeds anarchy. It distributes these tools at random. And with them goes the provocation for violence. The ability to make and use savage destroyers falls inevitably into the hands of smaller and smaller groups until at last the group is a single individual.

If you have not heard the moaning cries of the wounded and dying, you do not know about war.

It has not occurred to you that your ancestors were survivors and that the survival itself sometimes involved savage decisions, a kind of wanton brutality which civilized humankind works very hard to suppress. What price will you pay for that suppression? Will you accept your own extinction?

The only past which endures lies wordlessly within you.

Membership in a conspiracy, as in an army, frees people from the sense of personal responsibility.

Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future.

... the secret of community lies in suppression of the incompatible.

Single purpose is the mark of the fanatic...

I know a profound pattern which humans deny with their words even while their actions affirm it. They say they seeks security and quiet, the condition they call peace. Even as they speak, they create the seeds of turmoil and violence. If they find their quiet security, they squirm in it. How boring they find it. Look at them now.

If there is no enemy, one must be invented. The military force which is denied an external target always turns against its own people.

What you cannot control, you harness.

Rape is foreign to women... You ask for a sex-rooted behavioral difference? There’s one.

The problem of leadership is inevitably: Who will play God?

The more I find out, the more I realize that I don’t know what’s going on.

... when you think you know something, that is the most perfect barrier against learning.

Prisons are needed only to provide the illusion that courts and police are effective. They’re a kind of job insurance.

You talk of prisons and police and legalities, the perfect illusions behind which a prosperous power structure can operate while observing, quite accurately, that it is above its own laws.

The singular multiplicity of this universe draws my deepest attention. It is a thing of ultimate beauty.

... wealth is a tool of freedom. But the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.

One of the hardest things for a tyrant to find... is people who actually make decisions.

We never completely escape the teachers of our childhood.

Never attempt to reason with people who know they are right.

Beginnings! They are what life is all about!

Love needs no guarantees.

You know it’s love when you want to give joy and damn the consequences.

He... 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!

... why do you insist on taking pieces out of the continuum?... When you see a spectrum, do you desire one color there above all the others?

Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed.

From Heretics of Dune

Explosions are also compressions of time. Observable changes in the natural universe all are explosive to some degree and from some point of view; otherwise you would not notice them. Smooth Continuity of change, if slowed sufficiently, goes without notice by observers who time/attention span is too short.

Humans live best when each has his place to stand, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things and what he may achieve. Destroy the place and you destroy the person.

Understanding requires words. Some things cannot be reduced to words. There are things that can only be experienced wordlessly.

I can say God, but that is not my God. That is only a noise and no more potent than any other noise.

The trouble with some kinds of warfare is that they destroy all moral decency in susceptible types. Warfare of these kinds will dump the destroyed survivors back into an innocent population that is incapable of even imagining what such returned soldiers might do.

If we cannot adjust our differences peacefully we are less than human.

Why do you believe this?

Some people never observe anything. Life just happens to them. They get by on little more than a kind of dumb persistence, and they resist with anger and resentment anything that might lift them out of that false serenity.

The basic rule is this: Never support weakness; always support strength.

Nothing surpasses the complexity of the human mind.

Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?

Rot at the core always spreads outward.

Act stupid long enough and you become stupid.

Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the future as well.

Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.

Concealed behind strong barriers the heart becomes ice.

From Chapterhouse: Dune

Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.

"Because you're human and humans have this deep desire to classify, to apply labels to everything." "Why do we have to name things like that?" "Because that way we lay claim to what we name. We assume an ownership that can be misleading and dangerous." So she was back on ownership. "My street, my lake, my planet," she said. "My label forever. A label you give to a place or thing may not even last out your lifetime except as a polite sop granted by conquerors... or as a sound to remember in fear."

... there are weapons you cannot hold in your hands. You can only hold them in your mind.

You cannot manipulate a marionette with only one string.

Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck.

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.

All of us are descendants of people who did nasty things.... We don't like to think of barbarians in our ancestry but they're there... it is the victors who breed.

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.

Science must be innovative. It brings change. That's why science and bureaucracy fight a constant war.

Many things we do naturally become difficult only when we try to make them intellectual subjects. It is possible to know so much about a subject that you become totally ignorant.

Silence is often the best thing to say.

Show me a completely smooth operation and I'll show you someone who's covering mistakes. Real boats rock.

History, after all, was written by the victors.

We should grant power over our affairs only to those who are reluctant to hold it and then only under conditions that increase the reluctance.

Face your fears or they will climb over your back.

... the aim of arguments should be to change the nature of truth.

Never follow a leader without asking your own questions.

We witness a passing phase of eternity. Important things happen but some people never notice. Accidents intervene. You are not present at episodes. You depend on reports. And people shutter their minds. What good are reports? History in a news account? Preselected at an editorial conference, digested and excreted by prejudice? Accounts you need seldom come from those who make history. Diaries, memoirs and autobiographies are subjective forms of special pleading. Archives are crammed with such suspect stuff.

A hunchback does not see his own hunch.

Do not give someone a stick with which to beat you.