Frank Herbert Quotes

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

The hunter does not seek dead game.

~ Frank Herbert

You do not beg the sun for mercy.-Maud'dib's Travail from The Stilgar Commentary

~ 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

As long as my Duke remains unmarried some of the Great Houses can still hope for alliance.

~ Frank Herbert

And loyalty is a valued commodity. It can be sold . . . not bought, but sold.

~ 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

A popular man arouses the jealousy of the powerful.

~ 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

Religion, too, is a weapon. What manner of weapon is religion when it becomes the government?

~ 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

Caution is the path to mediocrity. Gliding, passionless mediocrity is all that most people think they can achieve.

~ Frank Herbert

Chance is the nature of our universe. […] madness represents a chaotic reservoir of surprises. Some surprises can be valuable.

~ Frank Herbert

Hard tasks need hard ways.

~ Frank Herbert

He straightened, assuming an odd attitude of dignity – as though it were another mask.

~ 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

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

One moment of incompetence can be fatal.

~ 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

No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero

~ 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

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

Since every individual is accountable ultimately to the self, the formation of that self demands our utmost care and attention.

~ Frank Herbert

We will never forgive and we will never forget.

~ Frank Herbert

Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. Something cannot emerge from nothing.

~ Frank Herbert

Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.

~ Frank Herbert

The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.

~ Frank Herbert

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

~ Frank Herbert

Truth suffers from too much analysis.

~ Frank Herbert

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

Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.

~ Frank Herbert

One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could be the general and widespread understanding of how severely limited logic really is.

~ Frank Herbert

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.

~ Frank Herbert