Frank Herbert Quotes

I am too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything...

To operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination.

I think when I started doing stand-up, that's when I really tried to question everything in my belief system which is - I think a pretty important part of being a comedian is really questioning things.

I deny nothing, but doubt everything.

If you've never met a student from the University of Chicago, I'll describe him to you. If you give him a glass of water, he says, 'This is a glass of water. But is it a glass of water? And if it is a glass of water, why is it a glass of water?' And eventually he dies of thirst.

Irreverence is a most necessary ingredient of religion. Not to speak of its importance in philosophy. Irreverence is the only way left to us for testing our universe.

The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder.

Insofar as the universities are free and independent, they will also be "subversive," in the sense that dominant structures of power and their ideological support will be subjected to challenge and critique, a counterpart to attitudes that are fostered in the hard sciences wherever they are taken seriously.

Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves.

Life without enquiry is not worth living for a man.

SAMO as an end to to mindwash religion, nowhere politics and bogus philosophy.

Refuse to accept the narrative of history laid down by presidents, prime ministers, generals and journalists.

Belief in truth begins with doubting all that has hitherto been believed to be true.

I could be wrong. Not being certain is what being a philosopher is all about.

Skepticism may undermine beliefs, but never belief.

Why' is the only question that bothers people enough to have an entire letter of the alphabet named after it. The alphabet does not go 'A B C D What? When? How?' but it does go 'V W X Why? Z.

A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted.

It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher.

Philosophy rests on a proposition that whatever is is right. Preaching begins by assuming that whatever is is wrong.

Questioning is the piety of thought.

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downwards through the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, and pride and prejudice, appearance and delusion, through the alluvium which covers the globe, through poetry and philosophy and religion, through church and state, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, till we come to a hard bottom that rocks in place which we can call reality and say, "This is and no mistake.

Philosophy may be defined as the art of asking the right question...awareness of the problem outlives all solutions. The answers are questions in disguise, every new answer giving rise to new questions.

Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt -- particularly to doubt one's cherished beliefs, one's dogmas and one's axioms.

To philosophize is to doubt.

ON HER DEATHBED, Gertrude Stein is said to have asked, 'What is the answer?' Then, after a long silence, 'What is the question?' Don't start looking in the Bible for the answers it gives. Start by listening for the questions it asks.