Frank Herbert Quotes
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When a wise man does not understand, he says: 'I do not understand.' The fool and the uncultured are ashamed of their ignorance. They remain silent when a question could bring them wisdom.
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Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.
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A person cries out against life because it's lonely, and because life's broken off from whatever created it. But no matter how much you hate life, you love it, too. It's like a caldron boiling with everything you have to have - but very painful to the lips.
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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.
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The scarce water of Dune is an exact analog of oil scarcity. CHOAM is OPEC.
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Science fiction, because it ventures into no man's lands, tends to meet some of the requirements posed by Jung in his explorations of archetypes, myth structures and self-understanding. It may be that the primary attraction of science fiction is that it helps us understand what it means to be human.
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To attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood. It is the attempt to see the Light without knowing the Darkness. It cannot be.
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You can say things which cannot be done. This is elementary. The trick is to keep attention focused on what is said and not on what can be done.
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Do you want an absolute prediction? Then you want only today, and you reject tomorrow. You are the ultimate conservative. You are trying to hold back movement in an infinitely changing universe. The verb to be does make idiots of us all.
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It is a wise man that does know the contented man is never poor, whilst the discontented man is never rich.
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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.
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Where is the weapon with which I enforce your bondage? You give it to me every time you open your mouth.
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Ecology is a dirty seven-letter word to many people. They are like heavy sleepers refusing to be aroused. 'Leave me alone! It's not time to get up yet!'
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'I only believe in certain kinds of hell,' she said, and again she was looking at him, the green eyes steady.'To each his own, eh?''You said it; I didn’t.'
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Technology is both a tool for helping humans and for destroying them. This is the paradox of our times which we're compelled to face.
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Is it possible this triviality is a code of some sort? the Brain wondered. But how could it be ... unless there's more to these emotional inconsequentials and this talk of a God than appears on the surface? The Brain had begun its career in logics as a pragmatic atheist. Now doubts began to creep into its computations, and it classified doubt as an emotion.
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The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.
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If we define Futurism as an exploration beyond accepted limits, then the nature of limiting systems becomes the first object of exploration.
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Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.
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We are questioning more than the philosophy behind our dependence upon limited and limiting systems. We question the power structures that have grown up around such systems.
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One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could be the general and widespread understanding of how severely limited logic really is.
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What I'm saying in my books boils down to this: Mine religion for what is good and avoid what is deleterious. Don't condemn people who need it. Be very careful when that need becomes fanatical.
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That is one of the Law's purposes, of course: to test the qualities of those who choose to employ it.
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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.