Frank Herbert Thinking Quotations

Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

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

The mistakes (of leaders) are amplified by the numbers who follow them without question. Charismatic leaders tend to build up followings, power structures and these power structures tend to be taken over by people who are corruptible. I don't think that the old saw about 'power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely' is accurate: I think power attracts the corruptible.

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

What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking-there’s the real danger.

Think on it, Chani: the princess will have the name, yet she'll live as less than a concubine - never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she's bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine - history will call us wives.

When he wanted, he could radiate charm and sincerity, but I often wonder in these later days if anything about him was as it seemed. I think now he was a man fighting constantly to escape the bars of an invisible cage.

I never thought it would be easy to serve God," she said. "I just didn't think it would be this hard.

Often I must Speak otherwise than I Think. This is Called Diplomacy.

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

When you think you know something: that is a most perfect barrier against learning.

The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.

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

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.

My father once told me that respect for truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. 'Something cannot emerge from nothing,' he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable 'the truth' can be.

Thinking you know something is a sure way to blind yourself.

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

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.