Frank Herbert - Power Quotes

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

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

Frank Herbert
The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.

Frank Herbert
Unused power was like a marionette with visible strings, nobody holding them. A compelling attraction: I could make it dance.

Frank Herbert
Law always chooses sides on the basis of enforcement power. Morality and legal niceties have little to do with it when the real question is: Who has the clout?

Frank Herbert
The basic lesson of our relativistic universe is that things change. Any power must always meet a greater power.

Frank Herbert
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.

Frank Herbert
Small souls who seek power over others first destroy the faith those others might have in themselves.

Frank Herbert
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 individual.

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
There exists a limit to the force even the most powerful may apply without destroying themselves. Judging this limit is the true artistry of government. Misuse of power is the fatal sin.

Frank Herbert
We never get far from wealth and all of its masks when we deal with power.

Frank Herbert
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
All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.

Frank Herbert
Whether a thought is spoken or not it is a real thing and has powers of reality.

Frank Herbert
Constitutions become the ultimate tyranny," Paul said. "They're organized power on such a scale as to be overwhelming. The constitution is social power mobilized and it has no conscience. It can crush the highest and the lowest, removing all dignity and individuality. It has an unstable balance point and no limitations.

Frank Herbert
Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect all who seek it... We should grant power over our affairs only to those who are reluctant to hold it and then only under conditions that increase that reluctance.

Frank Herbert
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.

Frank Herbert