Frank Herbert Quotes

We can forgive you for killing our children, but we can never forgive you for making us kill your children.

Some day we may be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our children, but we will never forgive them for making us kill some of theirs.

The whole human race loses by every act of personal vengeance.

Instead of a man of peace and love, I have become a man of violence and revenge.

An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.

An eye for any eye makes the whole world blind.

An eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.

The potential beauty of human life is constantly made ugly by man's ever recurring song of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever rising tides of revenge. Man has never risen above the injunction of the lex talionis: "Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot." In spite of the fact that the law of revenge solves no social problems, men continue to follow its disastrous leading. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path.

We can forgive [the Arabs] for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with [the Arabs] when they love their children more than they hate us...

It is useless to meet revenge with revenge; it will heal nothing.

In the aftermath of any war or genocide, healing and reconciliation are ultimate aspirations.

'Hatfields & McCoys' is a very profound statement in what happens when you're unable to let go of hatred and hurt and unable to have any kind of goodness in your life.

The South is the home of 'an eye for an eye.' 'Turning the other cheek'? The South can't see that.

We cannot get stuck in a cycle of violence which cannot be broken.

This is the vow to those consumed by hatred. We have but one path—waging war on them to the death.

There is no forgiveness, justice, or healing on any level when hate is involved.

Violence will only increase the cycle of violence.

Such, indeed, is the policy of civil war: severely to remember injuries, and to forget the most important services. Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive.

Justice is not Healing. Healing cometh only by suffering and patience, and maketh no demand, not even for Justice. Justice worketh only within the bonds of things as they are... and therefore though Justice is itself good and desireth no further evil, it can but perpetuate the evil that was, and doth not prevent it from the bearing of fruit in sorrow.

The reason I can't follow the old eye-for-an-eye philosophy is that it ends up leaving everyone blind.

As I rejected amnesty, so I reject revenge. I ask all Americans who ever asked for goodness and mercy in their lives, who ever sought forgiveness for their trespasses, to join in rehabilitating all the casualties of the tragic conflict of the past.

There is no ghost so difficult to lay as the ghost of an injury.

Nothing inspires forgiveness quite like revenge.

Love soothes wounds, while hatred and violence deepen them.

Retaliation is sometimes mercy, mercy to both parties