Brian Herbert Quotes

The aggressive incoherence of our common surroundings can be described as entropy made visible. The way we have disposed things on the landscape leads us in the direction of disorder and death. They are categorically evil. These dispositions are destroying our only home-planet and other organisms that share it. They defeat our need to care about where we are and the things in place there. They prompt us to feel that civilization is not worth carrying on. They rob us of our identity and our will to live. These things are not about personal taste or style.

I tried to develop some theories that took account of the uncertainty in the world and the complexity in the world.

Whenever you have dynamic interactions between 300 million people and the American economy acting in really complex ways, that introduces a degree of almost chaos theory to the system, in a literal sense.

We have a picture for how complexity arises, because if the universe is computationally capable, maybe we shouldn't be so surprised that things are so entirely out of control.

The world is deterministic, but it's chaotic and emergent.

For example, the idea that objects have properties out there in fixed ways is an incorrect idea about the world. Properties are created through relationships and processes. They are not inherent in electrons or photons or quanta any more than they are inherent in soil or trees or people. So my critique of reductionistic science is a critique that I have inherited from my scientific training. But it has been deepened by my experiences as an ecologist, in seeing the ecological destruction taking place today.

It was a country . . . that he and his people had known how to use and abuse, but not how to preserve.

humanity is a cancer on the body of the world

We're part of the unfolding world, surfing the chaotic waves

We live in a world that is cruel to the earth itself. Man is a biological terrorist.

A little-known truth: Every aspect of the world is fundamentally unpredictable. Computer scientists have long since proved this.

When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large scientific method in most cases fails. One need only think of the weather, in which case the prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible.

It's such an interesting world. It wouldn't be half so interesting if we knew all about everything, would it?

The modern world... has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.

The world, which God looked at and found entirely good, we find none too good to pollute entirely and destroy piecemeal.

Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.

We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.

What sucks the worst is . . . this world was a gift to us, and we broke it, and part of the deal is that if we want things right, we have to fix it ourselves. But we can't. We try, but we can't.

I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it's being ruined is hard.

Discovery is always rape of the natural world. Always.

I would say the world's in terrible shape, but I'm afraid the world would say, "Look who's talking".

What looked safe was not safe. What looked hard and unsafe was probably safer. Anyway, safe was somewhere else in the world.

You have to accept that sometimes that's how things happen in this world. People's opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.

We like to think of industrialization as being despicable. I don't really know what to make of it. There’s something terribly brittle about it. I suppose I would still prefer to sit under a tree with a picnic basket rather than under a gas pump, but signs and comic strips are interesting as subject matter. There are certain things that are usable, forceful, and vital about commercial art. We're using those things – but we're not really advocating stupidity, international teenagerism, and terrorism.

Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output.... In weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-jokingly known as the Butter- fly Effect—the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.