Frank Herbert Quotes

Once . . . long ago, he’d thought of himself as an inventor of government. But the invention had fallen into old patterns. It was like some hideous contrivance with plastic memory. Shape it any way you wanted, but relax for a moment, and it snapped into the ancient forms. Forces at work beyond his reach in human breasts eluded and defied him.

~ Frank Herbert

There exists a limit to the force even the most powerful may apply without destroying themselves. Judging this limit is the true artistry of government. Misuse of power is the fatal sin. The law cannot be a tool of vengeance, never a hostage, nor a fortification against the martyrs it has created. You cannot threaten any individual and escape the consequences.

~ Frank Herbert

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

Government cannot be religious and self-assertive at the same time. Religious experience needs a spontaneity which laws inevitably suppress. And you cannot govern without laws. Your laws eventually must replace morality, replace conscience, replace even the religion by which you think to govern. Sacred ritual must spring from praise and holy yearnings which hammer out a significant morality. Government, on the other hand, is a cultural organism particularly attractive to doubts, questions and contentions. I see the day coming when ceremony must take the place of faith and symbolism replaces morality.

~ Frank Herbert

The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.' And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning, 'That path leads ever down into stagnation.

~ Frank Herbert

Life produces a different taste each time you take it.

~ Frank Herbert

He 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. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.

~ Frank Herbert

He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future. Things persisted in not being what they seemed.

~ Frank Herbert

Whether a thought is spoken or not, it is a real thing and has powers of reality.

~ Frank Herbert

When we encounter personal problems, those things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan.

~ Frank Herbert

When strangers meet, great allowances should be made for differences in custom and training.

~ Frank Herbert

Don't sit with your back to any doors.

~ Frank Herbert

The universe is full of doors.

~ 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

Cynicism! That, no doubt is a greater crime than heresy.

~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You see, gentlemen, they have something to die for. They've discovered they're a people. They're awakening.

~ Frank Herbert

A killer with the manners of a rabbit - this is the most dangerous kind.

~ 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

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

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

The knife is more dangerous than the hand and the knife can be in either hand.

~ 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

If you focus your awareness only upon your own rightness, then you invite the forces of opposition to overwhelm you.

~ 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’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

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

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

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

Mood’s a thing for cattle or for making love. You fight when the necessity arises, no matter your mood.

~ Frank Herbert

What the eyes had seen could not be erased.

~ Frank Herbert