Quotes about Influence
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.
— Frank Herbert
One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim.
— Frank Herbert
We tend to become like the worst in those we oppose.
— Frank Herbert
To use raw power is to make yourself infinitely vulnerable to greater powers.
— Frank Herbert
In politics, the tripod is the most unstable of all structures.
— Frank Herbert
Leaders made mistakes. And those mistakes, amplified by the numbers who followed without questioning, moved inevitably toward great disasters.
— Frank Herbert
Law always chooses sides on the basis of enforcement power. Morality and legal niceties have little to do with it when the real question is: Who has the clout? —Bene
— Frank Herbert
Words can carry any burden we wish. All that's required is agreement and a tradition upon which to build.
— Frank Herbert
It is not the present which influences the future, thou fool, but the future which forms the present. You have it all backward. Since the future is set, an unfolding of events which will assure that future is fixed and inevitable.
— Frank Herbert
While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine—history will call us wives.
— Frank Herbert
Dune was a world of paradox now—a world under siege, yet the center of power. To come under siege, he decided, was the inevitable fate of power.
— Frank Herbert
The future is a thing to be shaped, Scytale said. Hold that thought, Princess.
— Frank Herbert