Frank Herbert - People Quotes

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" Life exists immersed in a sea of unconsciousness", he reminded himself.
"In the drug, these people gain a view of that sea".

Frank Herbert
We accept too damned many things on the explanations of people who could have good reasons for lying.

Frank Herbert
You can't build politics on love. People aren't concerned with love; it's too disordered. They prefer despotism. Too much freedom breeds chaos.

Frank Herbert
A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people.

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

Frank Herbert
No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.

Frank Herbert
The current utopian ideal being touted by people as politically diverse (on the surface, but not underneath) as President Richard M. Nixon and Senator Edward M. Kennedy goes as follows — no deeds of passion allowed, no geniuses, no criminals, no imaginative creators of the new. Satisfaction may be gained only in carefully limited social interactions, in living off the great works of the past. There must be limits to any excitement. Drug yourself into a placid "norm." Moderation is the key word…

Frank Herbert
It wasn't the kind of answer he'd expected — too subtly penetrating and leaving too much uncommitted. He reminded himself that it was difficult to control uncommitted people. Once a man had invested his energies, he could be twisted and turned at will... but if the man held back, conserved those energies...

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.] - Last words of Toure Bomoko

Frank Herbert
There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.

Frank Herbert
I don't think it's quite that simple. 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.

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. … Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe. The mistakes of superheroes involve too many of us in disaster.
It is the systems themselves that I see as dangerous.

Frank Herbert
Caution is the path to mediocrity. Gliding, passionless mediocrity is all that most people think they can achieve.

Frank Herbert
The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action in mind.

Frank Herbert
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!"

Frank Herbert
Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.

Frank Herbert
What is important for a leader is that which makes him a leader. It is the needs of his people.

Frank Herbert
The thing we must do intensely is be human together. People are more important than things. We must get together. The best thing humans can have going for them is each other. We have each other. We must reject everything which humiliates us. Humans are not objects of consumption. We must develop an absolute priority of humans ahead of profit — any humans ahead of any profit. Then we will survive. … Together.

Frank Herbert
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.

Frank Herbert
Motivating people, forcing them to your will, gives you a cynical attitude toward humanity. It degrades everything it touches.

Frank Herbert
You see, gentlemen, they have something to die for. They've discovered they're a people. They're awakening.

Frank Herbert