The Dosadi Experiment Quotes

“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, The Dosadi Experiment

“We accept too damned many things on the explanations of people who could have good reasons for lying.”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“We are plagued by a corrupt polity which promotes unlawful and/or immoral behaviour. Public interest has no practical significance in everyday behaviour among the ruling factions. The real problems of our world are not being confronted by those in power. In the guise of public service, they use whatever comes to hand for personal gain. They are insane with and for power.”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“Does a population have informed consent when that population is not taught the inner workings of its monetary system, and then is drawn, all unknowing, into economic adventures?”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“More fool he to let himself become an addict to anything, even to living.”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“We have a disturbed relationship with our past which religion cannot explain. We are primitive in unexplainable ways, our lives woven of the familiar and the strange, the reasonable and the insane.”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“It was a BuSab axiom that all power blocs tended toward aristocratic forms, that the descendants of decision makers dominated the power niches.”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“Divide and rule, subdivide and rule even more powerfully, fragment and rule absolutely.” “That’s”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“QUESTION: Who governs the governors?
ANSWER: Entropy.”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“In their passion for sameness, the tyrants made themselves more and more powerful. All others grew correspondingly weaker and weaker. New bureaus and directorates, odd ministries, leaped into existence for the most improbable purposes. These became the citadels of a new aristocracy, rulers who kept the giant wheel of government careening along, spreading destruction, violence, and chaos wherever they touched.”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“How strange. You're more Gowachin than a Gowachin.”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“The wise despot...maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“For the Gowachin, to stand alone against all adversity is the most sacred moment of existence.
— The Gowachin, a BuSab analysis”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“The more control, the more that requires control. This is the road to chaos.
— PanSpechi aphorism”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“When the means of great violence are widespread, nothing is more dangerous to the powerful than that they create outrage and injustice, for outrage and injustice will certainly ignite retaliation in kind.
— BuSab Manual”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“Governments always commit their entire populations when the demands grow heavy enough. By their passive acceptance, these populations become accessories to whatever is done in their name.”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“Communal/managed economics have always been more destructive of their societies than those driven by greed”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“The music of a civilization has far-reaching consequences on consciousness and, thus, influences the basic nature of a society. Music and its rhythms divert and compel the awareness, describing the limits within which a consciousness, thus fascinated, may operate.
Control the music, then, and you own a powerful tool with which to shape the society.
―The Dosadi Analysis, BuSab Documents”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“The attack by those who want to die — this is the attack against which you cannot prepare a perfect defense.
— Human aphorism”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“People always devise their own justifications. Fixed and immovable Law merely provides a convenient structure within which to hang your justifications and the prejudices behind them. The only universally acceptable law for mortals would be one which fitted every justification. What obvious nonsense. Law must expose prejudice and question justification. Thus, Law must be flexible, must change to fit new demands. Otherwise, it becomes merely the justification of the powerful.
— Gowachin Law (The BuSab Translation)”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“No legal system can maintain justice unless every participant — magisters, prosecutors, Legums, defendants, witnesses, all — risks life itself in whatever dispute comes before the bar. Everything must be risked in the Courtarena. If any element remains outside the contest and without personal risk, justice inevitably fails.
— Gowachin Law”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“We of the Sabotage Bureau remain legalists of a special category. We know that too much law injures a society; it is the same with too little law. One seeks a balance. We are like the balancing force among the Gowachin: without hope of achieving heaven in the society of mortals, we seek the unattainable. Each agent knows his own conscience and why he serves such a master. That is the key to us. We serve a mortal conscience for immortal reasons. We do it without hope of praise or the sureness of success.
— The early writings of Bildoon, PanSpechi Chief of BuSab”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“You have no position from which to negotiate. Certain things will be done. You will comply willingly, your compliance will be forced, or we will act without you.”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“There is a fundamental tension between science and freedom - no matter how science is viewed by its practitioners nor how freedom is sensed by those who believe they have it.”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“Fannie Mae had aroused his anger, then reduced his anger to verbal breast-beating, and finally to silent hurt. Still, the love remained. Why?”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“Geriatric or other life extension for the powerful poses a similar threat to a sentient species as that found historically in the dominance of a self-perpetuating bureaucracy. Both assume prerogatives of immortality, collecting more and more power with each passing moment. This is power which draws a theological aura about itself: the unassailable Law, the God-given mandate of the leader, manifest destiny. Power held too long within a narrow framework moves farther and farther away from the adaptive demands of changed conditions. The leadership grows ever more paranoid, suspicious of inventive adaptations to change, fearfully protective of personal power and, in the terrified avoidance of what it sees as risk, blindly leads its people into destruction.
―BuSab Manual”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“Gowachin Law made a special distinction between prejudgment and bias.
McKie considered this.
The interpretation of bias was: “If I can rule for a particular side I will do so.”
For prejudgment: “No matter what happens in the arena I will rule for a particular side.”
Bias was permitted, but not prejudgment.”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“On my arrival I was told to come to this place at this time. That is what I know.”
The least thing that is known shall govern your acts.
This was the course of evidence for the Gowachin. McKie's response put a legal burden on his questioner.”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“How to start a war? Nurture your own latent hungers for power. Forget that only madmen pursue power for its own sake. Let such madmen gain power—even you. Let such madmen act behind their conventional masks of sanity. Whether their masks be fashioned from the delusions of defense or the theological aura of law, war will come. —Gowachin aphorism”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“Professional legalists were absolutely prohibited from Gowachin judicial service. "Let the people judge.”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment