Frank Herbert - Children of Dune (1976)

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

Frank Herbert
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.

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

Frank Herbert
Good subjects must feel guilty. The guilt begins as a feeling of failure. The good autocrat provides many opportunities for failure in the populace.

Frank Herbert
When we try to conceal our innermost drives, the entire being screams betrayal.

Frank Herbert
I hear the wind blowing across the desert and I see the moons of a winter night rising like great ships in the void. To them I make my vow: I will be resolute and make an art of government; I will balance my inherited past and become a perfect storehouse of my relic memories. And I will be known for kindliness more than for knowledge. My face will shine down the corridors of time for as long as humans exist.

Frank Herbert
Most lives are a flight from selfhood. Most prefer the truths of the stable. You stick your head into the stanchions and munch contentedly until you die. Others use you for their purposes. Not once do you look outside the stable to lift your head and be your own creature.

Frank Herbert
What are you, child, that you need time to learn about yourself?

Frank Herbert
One must cast off old agonies as a snake casts off its skin--only to grow a new set and accept all of their limitations.

Frank Herbert
When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.

Frank Herbert
I'm going to rub your faces in things you try to avoid. I don't find it strange that all you want to believe is only that which comforts you. How else do humans invent the traps which betray us into mediocrity? How else do we define cowardice?

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

Frank Herbert
Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity.

Frank Herbert
Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma.

Frank Herbert
You aren't thinking or really existing unless you're willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgement of your existence.

Frank Herbert
Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces.

Frank Herbert
The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires. Thus always the human condition faces a beautifully empty canvas.

Frank Herbert
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.

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 proofs inevitably lead to propositions which have no proof! All things are known because we want to believe in them.

Frank Herbert
Every judgment teeters on the brink of error. To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

Frank Herbert
To be a god can ultimately become boring and degrading. There'd be reason enough for the invention of free will! A god might wish to escape into sleep and be alive only in the unconscious projections of his dream-creatures.

Frank Herbert
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.

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

Frank Herbert
Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class — whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.

Frank Herbert
The surest way to keep a secret is to make someone think they already know the answer.

Frank Herbert
We've lost something vital, I tell you. When we lost it, we lost the ability to make good decisions. We fall upon decisions these days the way we fall upon an enemy—or wait and wait, which is a form of giving up, and we allow the decisions of others to move us. Have we forgotten that we were the ones who set this current flowing?

Frank Herbert
Time is a measure of space, just as a range-finder is a measure of space, but measuring locks us into the place we measure.

Frank Herbert