Frank Herbert Quotes

Dangers lurk in all systems. Systems incorporate the unexamined beliefs of their creators. Adopt a system, accept its beliefs, and you help strengthen the resistance to change

~ Frank Herbert

Do actions agree with words? There's your measure of reliability. Never confine yourself to the words.

~ Frank Herbert

To accept a little death is worse than death itself.

~ Frank Herbert

He felt the inability to grieve as a terrible flaw.

~ Frank Herbert

We can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn.

~ Frank Herbert

But one learns from books and reels only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.

~ Frank Herbert

We accept too damned many things on the explanations of people who could have good reasons for lying.

~ Frank Herbert

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

Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place.

~ Frank Herbert

What you of the CHOAM directorate seem unable to understand is that you seldom find real loyalties in commerce ... Men must want to do things of their own innermost drives. People, not commercial organisations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work, every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you overorganize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness — they cannot work and their civilization collapses.

~ Frank Herbert

CHOAM is business and business follows profits.

~ Frank Herbert

When a Truthsayer's gifted by the drug, she can look many places in her memory - in her body's memory. We look down so many avenues of the past... but only feminine avenues... Yet there's a place no Truthsayer can see. We are repelled by it, terrorized. It is said a man will come one day and find in the gift of the drug his inward eye. He will look where we cannot - into both feminine and masculine pasts... Many men have tried the drug... so many, but none has succeeded.They tried and failed, all of them?They tried and died.

~ Frank Herbert

This wise man observed that wealth is a tool of freedom. But the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.

~ Frank Herbert

Humans are almost always lonely.

~ Frank Herbert

Growth is limited by the necessity which is present in the least amount. And naturally, the least favorable condition controls the growth rate

~ Frank Herbert

Small souls who seek power over others first destroy the faith those others might have in themselves.

~ Frank Herbert

People always want something more than immediate joy or that deeper sense called happiness. This is one of the secrets by which we shape the fulfillment of our designs. The something more assumes amplified power with people who cannot give it a name or who (most often the case) do not even suspect its existence. Most people only react unconsciously to such hidden forces. Thus, we have only to call a calculated something more into existence, define it and give it shape, then people will follow.

~ Frank Herbert

Only fools prefer the past!

~ Frank Herbert

Paul looked down at the hand that had known pain, and then up to the Reverend Mother. The sound of her voice contained a difference than from any other voicing his experience. The words were outlined in brilliance. There was an edge to them.

~ Frank Herbert

The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called spannungsbogen -- which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.

~ Frank Herbert

Black is a blind remembering, she thought. You listen for pack sounds, for the cries of those who hunted your ancestors in a past so ancient only your most primitive cells remember. The ears see. The nostrils see.

~ Frank Herbert

Then she said a good ruler has to learn his world’s language, that it’s different for every world. And I thought she meant they didn’t speak Galach on Arrakis, but she said that wasn’t it at all. She said she meant the language of the rocks and growing things, the language you don’t hear just with your ears. And I said that’s what Dr. Yueh calls the Mystery of Life.” Hawat chuckled. “How’d that sit with her?” “I think she got mad. She said the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience. So I quoted the First Law of Mentat at her: 'A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

~ Frank Herbert

He who controls the spice controls the universe.

~ Frank Herbert

I am a leg of the death tripod that will destroy our foes.

~ Frank Herbert

They compose poems to their knives.

~ Frank Herbert

Most discipline is hidden discipline, designed not to liberate but to limit. Do not ask Why? Be cautious with How? Why? leads inexorably to paradox. How? traps you in a universe of cause and effect. Both deny the infinite.

~ Frank Herbert

I don't speak, I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own.

~ Frank Herbert

It has occurred to me more than once that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.

~ Frank Herbert

No matter how much we ask after the truth, self-awareness is often unpleasant. We do not feel kindly toward the Truthsayer.

~ Frank Herbert

How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.

~ Frank Herbert

The test of a man isn’t what you think he’ll do. It’s what he actually does.

~ Frank Herbert

I come only to ask a simple question. Is Muad'Dib's death to be followed by the moral suicide of all men? Is that the inevitable aftermath of a Messiah?

~ Frank Herbert

Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.

~ Frank Herbert

I warn you that ignorance thrives on hysteria.

~ Frank Herbert

Money said, I warn you that ignorance thrives on hysteria.

~ Frank Herbert

There are many degrees of sight and many degrees of blindness. What senses do we lack that we cannot see another world all around us?

~ Frank Herbert

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

He's taking the change well? She asked.Except for getting a bit overtired. He's excited, but what 15-year-old wouldn't be under these circumstances?

~ Frank Herbert

Good governance never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.

~ Frank Herbert

Safaris through ancestral memories teach me many things. The patterns, ahhh, the patterns. Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me the most. I distrust extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It's true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who from such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of course, all bureaucracies follow this pattern, but what a hypocrisy to find this even under a communized banner.

~ Frank Herbert