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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.
Frank Herbert
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Frank Herbert
Age: 65 †
Born: 1920
Born: October 8
Died: 1986
Died: February 11
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Photographer
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Tacoma
Washington
Frank Patrick Herbert
Franklin Patrick Herbert
Franklin Herbert
Franklin Patrick Herbert
Jr.
Understand
Emerge
Comes
Basis
Father
Bases
Cannot
Profound
Truth
Morality
Nothing
Close
Something
Respect
Thinking
Told
Unstable
More quotes by 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.
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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.
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You know it's love when you want to give joy and damn the consequences.
Frank Herbert
A voice hissed: He sheds tears! It was taken around the ring Usal gives moisture to the dead! He felt fingers touch his damp cheek, heard the awed whispers.
Frank Herbert
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.
Frank Herbert
The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called spannungsbogen -- which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.
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One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could be the general and widespread understanding of how severely limited logic really is.
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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.
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Making workable choices occurs in a crucible of informative mistakes. Thus Intelligence accepts fallibility. And when absolute (infallible) choices are not known, Intelligence takes chances with limited data in an arena where mistakes are not only possible but also necessary.
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Demagogues are so easy to identify. They gesture a lot and speak with pulpit rhythms, using words that ring of religious fervour and god-fearing sincerity. Sincerity with nothing behind it takes so much practice. The practice can always be detected. Repetition. Great attempts to keep your attention on words.
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If you rely only on your eyes, your other senses weaken.
Frank Herbert
Sympathy for the enemy -- a weakness of police and armies alike. Most perilous are the unconscious sympathies directing you to preserve your enemy intact because the enemy is your justification for existence.
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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.
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The highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.
Frank Herbert
When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong - faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's to late.
Frank Herbert
It must certainly be more dangerous to live in ignorance than to live with knowledge.
Frank Herbert
Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who so survive.
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When you think you know something: that is a most perfect barrier against learning.
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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?
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His voice was low, charged with unspeakable adjectives.
Frank Herbert