Frank Herbert Quotes

If we don't act at all (express our imaginings either in work or a changing personality, so that we can learn and think again something better) we certainly rot.

So fixed are our spirits in slothfulness and cold indifference that we seldom overcome so much as one evil habit.

Our trouble is not ignorance, but inaction.

Our generation has an incredible amount of realism, yet at the same time it loves to complain and not really change. Because, if it does change, then it won't have anything to complain about.

Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.

Inertia is a powerful force in human and political affairs.

To change, to convert? Why bother?

Habit is a great deadener.

History is moving the furniture around in the house of mankind just about everywhere but the U.S.A. Things have changed, except here, where people come and go through the rooms of state, and everything looks shabbier by the day, and lethargy eats away at the upholstery like an acid fog, and the walls reverberate with meaningless oratory.

When you do anything for eight or nine years, you start getting a little comfortable; you start taking things for granted.

My 'if it's not broken, don't fix it' type attitude might have held me back and made me complacent.

Because we've always done it that way.' During my 12-year tenure as a special agent with the U.S. Secret Service, I heard those words all too often. The agency, in my experience, has an entrenched management culture resistant to change.

Strange enough how creatures of the human-kind shut their eyes to plainest facts; and by the mere inertia of Oblivion and Stupidity, live at ease in the midst of Wonders and Terrors. But indeed man is, and was always, a blockhead and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider. Prejudice, which he pretends to hate, is his absolute lawgiver; mere use-and-wont everywhere leads him by the nose; thus let but a Rising of the Sun, let but a Creation of the World happen twice, and it ceases to be marvellous, to be noteworthy, or noticeable.

One thing I've learnt recently: how to think nothing. Here's the trick: don't have any interest in the world around you, don't have any hope for the future, and be warm.

The vigorous man industriously striving for the improvement of his condition acts neither more nor less than the lethargic man who sluggishly takes things as they come. For to do nothing and to be idle are also action, they too determine the course of events.

We do not want to think. We do not want to hear. We do not care about anything. Only give us a good dinner and plenty of money, and let us outshine our neighbors. There is the Nineteenth Century Gospel.

Only the drum is confident, it thinks the world has not changed

People who don't want to get on with their lives, and don't want to accept responsibility for the direction of their lives want to hang out with other people who don't want to accept responsibility or move on, and so you find that your entire culture around you are people who are just like you, because that's what's comforting.

Nobody has ever thought himself to death. The chief danger confronting us is not age. It is laziness, sloth, routine, stupidity, - forcing their way in like wind through the shutters, seeping into the cellar like swamp water.

Sometimes, the hardest habit to break is the habit of doing nothing beyond the necessary.

Show me a thoroughly contented person, and I will show you a useless one.

For a thing to remain undone nothing more is needed than to think of it done.

To think to keep things as they are, is to let them move unpredictably, since nothing but death will still the beat of the heart or keep the universe from its perpetual motion.

Those who don't want to change, let them sleep.

Mental inertia is death.