All Quotes

"If you ask "Should we be in space?" you ask a nonsense question. We are in space. We will be in space."

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

"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."

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

"I’ve heard you say, Bell, that logic is good for playing pyramid chess but often too slow for needs of survival."

"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."

"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."

"One of the most important things is corporate politics. Big corporations are bureaucracies that often promote people who are best at covering their asses. Such people run scared, fearful of any suggestion they can make mistakes. And they surround themselves with others who run the same way. Don't take risks. Find out what succeeds and copy it."

"Dune was aimed at this whole idea of the infallible leader because my view of history says mistakes made by a leader (or made in a leader's name) are amplified by the numbers who follow without question. That's how 900 people wound up in Guyana drinking poison Kool-Aid. That's how the U.S. said "Yes, sir, Mister Charismatic John Kennedy!" and found itself embroiled in Vietnam. That's how Germany said "Sieg Heil!" and murdered more than six million of our fellow human beings."

"The first duty of the revolutionaries is to tell the truth. Fooling the people, promoting illusions, always brings the worst consequences, and I believe that the people should be warned against excessive optimism. How did the Red Army win the war? By telling the truth. How did the dictatorship lose the war? By deceiving the soldiers."

"A revolution is not a trail of roses.... A revolution is a fight to the death between the future and the past."

"A man is a fool not to put everything he has, at any given moment, into what he is creating. You're there now doing the thing on paper. You're not killing the goose, you're just producing an egg. So I don't worry about inspiration, or anything like that. It's a matter of just sitting down and working. I have never had the problem of a writing block. I've heard about it. I've felt reluctant to write on some days, for whole weeks, or sometimes even longer. I'd much rather go fishing, for example, or go sharpen pencils, or go swimming, or what not. But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, 'Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write.' There's no difference on paper between the two."

"Religious services, thought Ramsey. Here's one of the binding forces of this crew. Participation Mystique! The consecration of the warriors before the foray."

"Ramsey could contain the question no longer. "What's your definition of sanity, Skipper?" "The ability to swim," said Sparrow...."That means the sane person has to understand currents, has to know what's required in different waters.""

"I must not fear."

"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."

"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."

"Without coming fully awake, Rhin felt his presence beside her, experienced a primitive demand for his protective masculinity. She nestled against him, murmured, "its so hot. Doesn’t it ever cool off?""

"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."

"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..."

"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."

"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."

"A slave is one who must produce wealth for another," the Brain said. "There is only one true wealth in all the universe. I have given you some of it. I have given your father and your mate some of it. And your friends. This wealth is living time. Time. Are we slaves because we have given you more time to live?"

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

""We sift reality through screens composed of ideas. These idea systems are limited by language. That is to say: language cuts the grooves in which our thoughts move. If we seek new validity forms,we must step outside the language"."

""It isn't surprising," Piaget said, "to find the 'N-square' law from warfare being applied to advertising and politics — other kinds of warfare, you see — with no real conversion problem from one field to the other. Each has its concepts of concentration and exposure. The mathematics of differentials and predictions apply equally well, no matter the field of battle"."

"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."

"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."

"No matter how finely you subdivide time and space, each tiny division contains infinity. But this could imply that you can cut across linear time, open it like a ripe fruit, and see consequential connections. You could be prescient, predict accurately. Predestination and paradox once more. The flaw must lie in our methods of description, in languages, in social networks of meaning, in moral structures, and in philosophies and religions — all of which convey implicit limits where no limits exist. Paul Muad'Dib, after all, says this time after time throughout Dune."

"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."

"In the beginning I was just as ready as anyone to fall into step, to seek out the guilty and to punish the sinners, even to become a leader. Nothing, I felt, would give me more gratification than riding the steed of yellow journalism into crusade, doing the book that would right the old wrongs. Reevaluation raised haunting questions.I now believe that evolution, or deevolution, never ends short of death, that no society has ever achieved an absolute pinnacle, that all humans are not created equal. In fact, I believe attempts to create some abstract equalization create a morass of injustices that rebound on the equalizers. Equal justice and equal opportunity are ideals we should seek, but we should recognize that humans administer the ideals and that humans do not have equal ability."

"Reevaluation taught me caution. I approached the problem with trepidation. Certainly, by the loosest of our standards there were plenty of visible targets, a plethora of blind fanaticism and guilty opportunism at which to aim painful barbs. But how did we get this way? What makes a Nixon? What part do the meek play in creating the powerful? If a leader cannot admit mistakes, these mistakes will be hidden. Who says our leaders must be perfect? Where do they learn this?"

"The scarce water of Dune is an exact analog of oil scarcity. CHOAM is OPEC."

"Where is the weapon with which I enforce your bondage? You give it to me every time you open your mouth."

"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."

"Learning a language represents training in the delusions of that language."

"Providence and Manifest Destiny are synonyms often invoked to support arguments based on wishful thinking."

"That is one of the Law's purposes, of course: to test the qualities of those who choose to employ it."

"Does a populace have informed consent when a ruling minority acts in secret to ignite a war, doing this to justify the existence of the minority's forces? History already has answered that question. Every society in the ConSentiency today reflects the historical judgment that failure to provide full information for informed consent on such an issue represents an ultimate crime."

"Does a population have informed consent when that population is not taught the inner workings of its monetary system, and then is drawn, all unknowing, into economic adventures?"

"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."

"IB: Frank Herbert said there was this conception we held of the future. We refer to it as "the future" as if there was one future. UL: That's sweet. He had a lovely mind, Frank did."

"My all-time favorite writer is Frank Herbert, who wrote Dune. He wrote a lot of other books, too, and then he wrote a mainstream novel that let me know what to expect if I ever tried it. The jacket copy proclaimed, "His first serious novel.""

"There is a tirelessness about the man and his works. Part guru, part Ancient Mariner, Frank Herbert showed us how to make SF think."

"I feel my belief in sacrifice and struggle getting stronger. I despise the kind of existence that clings to the miserly trifles of comfort and self-interest. I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened."

"The 26th of July Movement is not a tendency within the party, it is the revolutionary apparatus of Chibas's organization, a grass-roots movement, from which it emerged to fight against the dictator, while the Ortodoxo Party was lying helpless and divided. From then on, our revolutionary thesis has been the thesis of our party's masses; they had expressed their feelings unequivocally, from then on, the masses and the eladers have gone different ways."

"The 26th of July Movement is the revolutionary organization of the humble, by the humble, for the humble. The 26th July Movement is the hope of redemption for the Cuban working class, who can hope for nothing from the political cliques; it is the hope of land for the peasants who live like pariahs in the country whose freedom their grandfathers won; it is the hope of going back home for the emigres who had to leave their country, here they could not live or work, and it is the hope of daily bread for the hungry and of justice for the forgotten."

"Weapons for what? (¿Armas, para qué?) To fight against whom? Against the revolutionary government, that has the support of the whole people? ... Weapons for what? Hiding weapons for what? To blackmail the President of the Republic? To threaten to break the peace here? To create organizations of gangsters? Is it that we are going to return to gangsterism? Is it that we will return to daily shootouts in the capital? Weapons for what?"

"I am not a dictator, and I do not think I will become one. I will not maintain power with a machine gun."

"Men do not shape destiny. Destiny produces the man for the hour."