Frank Herbert - Chapterhouse: Dune (1985)

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Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.

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

Frank Herbert
Give me the judgment of balanced minds in preference to laws every time. Codes and manuals create patterned behavior. All patterned behavior tends to go unquestioned, gathering destructive momentum.

Frank Herbert
The oppressed always learned from and copied the oppressor. When the tables were turned, the stage was set for another round of revenge and violence -- roles reversed. And reversed and reversed ad nauseam.

Frank Herbert
Try to hold on to youth and it mocks you while it sprints away.

Frank Herbert
Most of us choose our companions and surroundings to reflect ourselves.

Frank Herbert
The writing of history is largely a process of diversion. Most historical accounts distract attention from the secret influences behind great events.

Frank Herbert
What greater gift is there than to demonstrate you need not fear death?

Frank Herbert
Order generally was a product of human activity. Chaos existed as a raw material from which to create order.

Frank Herbert
The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed.

Frank Herbert
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 definitions.

Frank Herbert
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.

Frank Herbert
Intelligence takes chances with limited data in an arena where mistakes are not only possible but also necessary.

Frank Herbert
The most terrifying things in the universe came from human minds.

Frank Herbert
Paired opposites define your longings and those longings imprison you.

Frank Herbert
Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. The judgmental precedents of law function that way, littering your path with dead ends. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.

Frank Herbert
Producing perfection from imperfection is, after all, the highest of art forms.

Frank Herbert
Answers are a perilous grip on the universe. They can appear sensible yet explain nothing.

Frank Herbert
Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit.

Frank Herbert
Ask what Infinity might produce and the only answer possible was, "Anything." Any good, any evil; any god, any devil.

Frank Herbert
Democracy is susceptible to being led astray by having scapegoats paraded in front of the electorate.

Frank Herbert
When you think to take determination of your fate into your own hands, that is the moment you can be crushed. Be cautious.

Frank Herbert
Educational bureaucracies dull a child's questing sensitivity.

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

Frank Herbert
Do actions agree with words? There's your measure of reliability. Never confine yourself to the words.

Frank Herbert
War is behavior with roots in the single cell of the primeval seas. Eat whatever you touch or it will eat you.

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

Frank Herbert
Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know.

Frank Herbert
Those who would repeat the past must control the teaching of history.

Frank Herbert