Frank Herbert Quotes

Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. Something cannot emerge from nothing.
Frank Herbert
We will never forgive and we will never forget.
Frank Herbert
Since every individual is accountable ultimately to the self, the formation of that self demands our utmost care and attention.
Frank Herbert
We will not run," Paul said. "We'll move with dignity. We'll do what must be done.
Frank Herbert
Do you wrestle with dreams? Do you contend with shadows? Do you move in a kind of sleep? Time has slipped away. Your life is stolen. You tarried with trifles, Victim of your folly.
Frank Herbert
What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises—no matter the mood! Mood's a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It's not for fighting.
Frank Herbert
No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero
Frank Herbert
It could be a work of art among vendettas
Frank Herbert
Schools were started to train human talents... The Guild... emphasizes almost pure mathematics. Bene Gesserit performs... politics. The original Bene Gesserit school was directed by those who saw the need of a thread of continuity in human affairs. They saw there count be no such continuity without separating human stock from animal stock - for breeding purposes.
Frank Herbert
One moment of incompetence can be fatal.
Frank Herbert
The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.
Frank Herbert
The price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life--we went soft, we lost our edge.
Frank Herbert
He straightened, assuming an odd attitude of dignity – as though it were another mask.
Frank Herbert
Hard tasks need hard ways.
Frank Herbert
Chance is the nature of our universe. […] madness represents a chaotic reservoir of surprises. Some surprises can be valuable.
Frank Herbert
Caution is the path to mediocrity. Gliding, passionless mediocrity is all that most people think they can achieve.
Frank Herbert
Police are inevitably corrupted. ... Police always observe that criminals prosper. It takes a pretty dull policeman to miss the fact that the position of authority is the most prosperous criminal position available.
Frank Herbert
Religion, too, is a weapon. What manner of weapon is religion when it becomes the government?
Frank Herbert
How would we flood village and city with our information? The people must learn how well I govern them. How would they know if we didn't tell them?
Frank Herbert
A popular man arouses the jealousy of the powerful.
Frank Herbert
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
And loyalty is a valued commodity. It can be sold . . . not bought, but sold.
Frank Herbert
As long as my Duke remains unmarried some of the Great Houses can still hope for alliance.
Frank Herbert
Do you know what guerrillas often say? They claim that their rebellions are invulnerable to economic warfare because they have no economy, that they are parasitic on those they would overthrow. The fools merely fail to access the coin in which they must inevitably pay. The pattern is inexorable in its degenerative failures. You see it repeated in the systems of slavery, of welfare states, of caste-ridden religions, of socializing bureaucracies -- in any system in which creates and maintains dependencies. Too long a parasite and you cannot exist without a host.
Frank Herbert
You do not beg the sun for mercy.-Maud'dib's Travail from The Stilgar Commentary
Frank Herbert
The hunter does not seek dead game.
Frank Herbert
There will be sadness," Alia intoned. "I remind you that all things are but beginning, forever beginning. Worlds wait to be conquered. Some within the sound of my voice will attain exalted destinies. You will sneer at the past, forgetting what I tell you now: within all differences there is unity.
Frank Herbert
Wild Fremen said it well: "Four things cannot be hidden -- love, smoke, a pillar of fire and a man striding across the open bled.
Frank Herbert
What the eyes had seen could not be erased.
Frank Herbert
Mood’s a thing for cattle or for making love. You fight when the necessity arises, no matter your mood.
Frank Herbert
Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?
Frank Herbert
For what do you hunger, Lord?” Moneo ventured.“For a humankind which can make truly long-term decisions. Do you know the key to that ability, Moneo?”“You have said it many times, Lord. It is the ability to change your mind.
Frank Herbert
Then are there no rules at all, Lord?” Moneo's voice conveyed a faint hint of hysteria.Leto smiled to ease the man's tensions. “Perhaps one. Short–term decisions tend to fail in the long–term.
Frank Herbert
We’ve lost something vital, I tell you. When we lost it, we lost the ability to make good decisions. We fall upon decisions these days the way we fall upon an enemy—or wait and wait, which is a form of giving up, and we allow the decisions of others to move us. Have we forgotten that we were the ones who set this current flowing?
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
If you focus your awareness only upon your own rightness, then you invite the forces of opposition to overwhelm you.
Frank Herbert
Nothing wins more loyalty for a leader than an air of bravura," the Duke said. "I, therefore, cultivate an air of bravura.
Frank Herbert
Piter: Ah-ah, Baron! Is it not regrettable you were unable to devise this delicious scheme by yourself?Baron: Someday I will have you strangled, Piter.Piter: Of a certainty, Baron. Enfin! But a kind act is never lost, eh?Baron: Have you been chewing verite or semuta, Piter?
Frank Herbert
The knife is more dangerous than the hand and the knife can be in either hand.
Frank Herbert
But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write.
Frank Herbert
Hayt felt suddenly that he existed in a dream controlled by some other mind, and that he might momentarily forget this to become lost in the convolutions of that mind.
Frank Herbert
And the question of Wester religion,” Flattery said, “is: What lies beyond death? But the question of the Zen master is: What lies beyond waking?
Frank Herbert
What was it St. Augustine said? "The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.
Frank Herbert
A killer with the manners of a rabbit - this is the most dangerous kind.
Frank Herbert
You see, gentlemen, they have something to die for. They've discovered they're a people. They're awakening.
Frank Herbert
What's law? Control? Law filters chaos and what drips through? Serenity? Law -- our highest ideal and our basest nature. Don't look too closely at the law. Do, and you'll find the rationalized interpretations, the legal casuistry, the precedents of convenience. You'll find the serenity, which is just another word for death.
Frank Herbert
Most civilisation is based on cowardice. It's so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.
Frank Herbert
I have said: "Blow out the lamp! Day is here!" And you keep saying: "Give me a lamp so I can find the day.
Frank Herbert
I point out to you, Marcus Claire Luyseyal, a lesson from past over-machined societies which you appear not to have learned. The devices themselves condition theusers to employ each other the way they employ machines.
Frank Herbert
Technology tends toward avoidance of risks by investors. Uncertainty is ruled out if possible. People generally prefer the predictable. Few recognize how destructive this can be, how it imposes severe limits on variability and thus makes whole populations fatally vulnerable to the shocking ways our universe can throw the dice.
Frank Herbert
What delicious abandon in the sleep of the child. Where do we lose it?
Frank Herbert
You must teach me the way you thrust your worries aside and turn to practical matters.
Frank Herbert
Clinging to any form of conservatism can be dangerous. Become too conservative and you are unprepared for surprises. You cannot depend on luck. Logic is blind and often knows only its own past. Logic is good for playing chess but is often too slow for the needs of survival.
Frank Herbert
The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: "I feed on your energy.
Frank Herbert
Cynicism! That, no doubt is a greater crime than heresy.
Frank Herbert
Use the first moments in study. You may miss many an opportunity for quick victory in this way, but the moment the study are in insurance of success. Take your time and be sure.
Frank Herbert
The Atreides are known to start late getting there growth.
Frank Herbert
To exist is to stand out, away from the background," The Preacher said. "You aren't thinking or really existing unless you're willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgment of your existence.
Frank Herbert
Reason is the first victim of strong emotion," Scytale murmured.
Frank Herbert
The universe is full of doors.
Frank Herbert