Talk:Frank Herbert

From DUNE (Page 433 of an Ace Book, paperback, copyright 1965) "The Harkonnens control it!" Gurney protested. "The people who can destroy a thing, they control it," Paul said.

--submitted by bjg 2005.09.01

Unsourced

Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable, precise and verifiable source for any quote on this list please move it to Frank Herbert. --Antiquary 19:32, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

• 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.

• I think science fiction does help, and it points in very interesting directions. It points in relativistic directions. It says that we have the imagination for these other opportunities, these other choices. We tend to tie ourselves down to limited choices. We say, 'Well, the only answer is. . .' or, 'If you would just. . .' Whatever follows these two statements narrows the choices right there. It gets the vision right down close to the ground so that you don't see anything happening outside. Humans tend not to see over a long range. Now we are required, in these generations, to have a longer range view of what we inflict on the world around us. This is where, I think, science fiction is helping. I don't think that the mere writing of such a book as Brave New World or 1984 prevents those things which are portrayed in those books from happening. But I do think they alert us to that possibility and make that possibility less likely. They make us aware that we may be going in that direction. We may be contriving a strictly controlled police culture. B. F. Skinner worries the hell out of me. He is right out of Huxley. He is standing there like a small boy saying, 'Please let me have a world like this because I feel safe in it!' He is saying, 'I want to control it.' He may be very accurate in his assessment that our total society is going in that direction and that maybe he is opting for the lesser of numerous evils, in his view. But what kind of a society would that produce?

• It is a wise man that does know the contented man is never poor, whilst the discontented man is never rich....

• Kindness is the beginning of cruelty.

• Religion often partakes of the myth of progress that shields us from the terrors of an uncertain future.

• The proximity of a desirable thing tempts one to overindulgence. On that path lies danger.

• The stakes in conflict do not change. Battle determines who will control the wealth or its equivalent.

• 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.

• Wealth is a tool of freedom, but the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.

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

• The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it.

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

• All governments eventually lean further and further towards aristocracy.

• 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.

• To endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe. You cannot hire a wise man or any other intellect to solve it for you. There's no writ of inquest or calling of witness to provide answers. No servant or disciple can dress the wound. You dress it yourself or continue bleeding for all to see.

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

• Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent mutual regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it.

• Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. ...The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.

• Bureaucracy destroys initiative.
  • This is sourced in the Dune article, and also listed at Bureaucracy. ~ Ningauble 17:26, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

• Humans live best when each has a place to stand, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things and what he may achieve. Destroy the place and you destroy the person.

• Blood is thicker than water, but politics are thicker than blood.

See also section

I personally think that we don't need to include "Dune" in the "See Also" section, as it is linked to multiple times in the article, and there's also a note in the "Dune" subsection ("These are just a couple sample quotes, for more quotes from this novel see Dune") which directs the reader to it. --User:Tryst (talk to me!) 17:46, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Notwithstanding any redundancies, I believe that when an author page has a "See also" section it ought to list all pages that we have on works by that author (even in a case like William Shakespeare where they are quite numerous and are redundant with a category). ~ Ningauble (talk) 18:09, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Ok, would it be appropriate to remove the note under the "Dune" subsection then ? --User:Tryst (talk to me!) 18:21, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

It is customary and useful to include a link at the point where one or two quotes are excerpted from an article on the author's work. I would not fret about these redundancies – the act of quotation itself is redundant. ~ Ningauble (talk) 14:37, 18 July 2012 (UTC)