Top 100 Frank Herbert Quotes
#3. No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero
Frank Herbert
#4. Politics: the art of appearing candid and completely open while concealing as much as possible.
Frank Herbert
#6. There's no such thing as equal justice anywhere. It's unsettling to a society when you try to achieve such a false balance.
Frank Herbert
#7. Communal/managed economics have always been more destructive of their societies than those driven by greed
Frank Herbert
#8. If we define Futurism as an exploration beyond accepted limits, then the nature of limiting systems becomes the first object of exploration.
Frank Herbert
#10. In all Things you must appear important. No minor decisions pass through your hands unless they are quiet acts called 'Favors' done for people whose loyalty can be earned.
Frank Herbert
#11. I'm the well-trained fruit tree. Full of well-trained feelings and abilities and all of them grafted onto me
Frank Herbert
#12. Each of us comes into being knowing who he is and what he is supposed to do.' ... 'Small children know,' Leto said. 'It's only after adults have confused them that children hide this knowledge even from themselves.
Frank Herbert
#13. The most terrifying things in the universe came from human minds.
Frank Herbert
#15. If you ask "Should we be in space?" you ask a nonsense question. We are in space. We will be in space.
Frank Herbert
#16. A good ruler has to learn his world's language, and that's different for every world, the language you don't hear just with your ears.
Frank Herbert
#17. You always know the creative because it is revealed openly. Concealment betrays the existence of another force entirely.
Frank Herbert
#18. The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed.
Frank Herbert
#19. I see the signs!" Jessica snapped. "My question was meant to remind you that you should not try to teach me those matters in which I instructed you." Paul
Frank Herbert
#20. What delicious abandon in the sleep of the child. Where do we lose it?
Frank Herbert
#21. Military foolishness is ultimately suicidal. They believe that by risking death they pay the price of any violent behavior against enemies of their own choosing. They have the invader mentality, that false sense of freedom from responsibility for your own actions.
Frank Herbert
#22. Unfortunately most criticism is by poseurs. They use their comments about someone else's work as a platform on which to strike poses. What they're really saying is: "Look at me! Look at me!"
Frank Herbert
#23. The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it.
Frank Herbert
#24. as had happened so many times in the past, for every problem solved a new one was added. Beneath
Frank Herbert
#26. How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.
Frank Herbert
#27. Duncan, have I not told you that when you think you know something, that is a most perfect barrier against learning?
Frank Herbert
#28. What I'm saying in my books boils down to this: Mine religion for what is good and avoid what is deleterious. Don't condemn people who need it. Be very careful when that need becomes fanatical.
Frank Herbert
#29. Do as she says, you wormfaced, crawling, sand-brained piece of lizard turd!
Frank Herbert
#30. But it's well known that repression makes a religion flourish.
Frank Herbert
#31. Chance is the nature of our universe. [ ... ] madness represents a chaotic reservoir of surprises. Some surprises can be valuable.
Frank Herbert
#32. As long as you believe yourself helpless, you remain helpless even though resolute.
Frank Herbert
#33. We never completely escape the teachers of our childhood nor any of the patterns that formed us.
Frank Herbert
#34. Better a dry morsel and quietness therewith than a house full of sacrifice and strife.
Frank Herbert
#35. Why is it that foolishness repeats itself with such monotonous precision?
Frank Herbert
#36. You can say things which cannot be done. This is elementary. The trick is to keep attention focused on what is said and not on what can be done.
Frank Herbert
#37. 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
#38. They've lost the initiative, which means they've lost the war. Gurney
Frank Herbert
#39. Justice required resort to law and that could be a fickle mistress, subject always to the whims and prejudices of those who administered the laws.
Frank Herbert
#40. Riots and comedy are but symptoms of the times, profoundly revealing. They betray the psychological tone, the deep uncertainties ... and the striving for something better, plus the fear that nothing would come of it all.
Frank Herbert
#41. The test of a man isn't what you think he'll do. It's what he actually does.
Frank Herbert
#43. We have eternity, beloved."
"You may have eternity. I have only now."
"But this is eternity.
Frank Herbert
#44. The struggle between life elements is the struggle for the free energy of a system.
Frank Herbert
#46. We faced it and did not resist. The storm passed through us and around us. It's gone, but we remain.
Frank Herbert
#47. She looked at patches of blackness. Black is a blind remembering, she thought.
Frank Herbert
#48. There's coffee for those who want it,' the Duke said.
Frank Herbert
#49. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him.
Frank Herbert
#50. Moral decisions are always easy to recognize," Odrade said. "They are where you abandon self-interest.
Frank Herbert
#52. QUESTION: Who governs the governors?
ANSWER: Entropy.
Frank Herbert
#53. 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
#56. Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.
Frank Herbert
#57. Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, 'I am not the kind of person I want to be.' It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.
Frank Herbert
#58. For them, 'mektub al mellah', as the Fremen say."
"The thing was written with salt," Irulan translated.
Frank Herbert
#59. If you live in bad faith, lies will appear to you like the truth.
Frank Herbert
#60. He has learned that it is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past.
Frank Herbert
#61. The drowning man who climbs on your shoulders to save himself is understandable - except when you see it happen in the drawing room.
Frank Herbert
#62. 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
#63. Words are such gross machinery, so primitive and ambiguous.
Frank Herbert
#64. Often I must Speak otherwise than I Think. This is Called Diplomacy.
Frank Herbert
#65. When religion and politics ride the same cart, when that cart is driven by a living holy man (baraka), nothing can stand in their path.
Frank Herbert
#66. The day hums sweetly when you have enough bees working for you.
Frank Herbert
#68. Create or arouse such unbridled forces and you built carnal fantasies of enormous complexity. You could lead whole populations around by their desires, by their fantasy projections.
Frank Herbert
#69. Blood is thicker than water, but politics are thicker than blood.
Frank Herbert
#70. There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man - with human flesh.
Frank Herbert
#71. There's steel in this man that no one has taken the temper out of ...
Frank Herbert
#72. When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual.
Frank Herbert
#74. That is the beginning of knowledge - the discovery of something we do not understand. Before
Frank Herbert
#75. When you imagine mistakes, there can be no self-defense.
Frank Herbert
#76. Ideas are a dime a dozen. It's execution that counts.
Frank Herbert
#78. That which makes a man superhuman is terrifying.
Frank Herbert
#81. War is the most readily available form of chaos.
Frank Herbert
#82. Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what's incomplete and saying: 'Now, it's complete because it's ended here.'
- from Collected Sayings of Maud'Dib' by the Princess Irulan
Frank Herbert
#83. Major flaws in government arise from a fear of making radical internal changes even though a need is clearly seen. - Darwi Odrade
Frank Herbert
#84. Do not make the error of considering my son a child, the Duke said. And he smiled.
Frank Herbert
#85. The tribal commander must lose no face among those who should obey him. Paul
Frank Herbert
#86. All of history is a malleable instrument in my hands. Ohhh, I have accumulated all of these pasts and I possess every fact - yet the facts are mine to use as I will and, even using them truthfully, I change them.
Frank Herbert
#87. But, putting on a stillsuit, he put on the desert.
Frank Herbert
#88. There is only one true wealth in all the universe
living time.
Frank Herbert
#89. Too Much Knowledge never makes for Simple Decisions.
Frank Herbert
#90. I am a collection of the obsolete, a relic of the damned, of the lost and strayed. I am the waylaid pieces of history which sank out of sight in all of our pasts. Such an accumulation of riffraff has never before been imagined.
Frank Herbert
#91. Democracy is susceptible to being led astray by having scapegoats paraded in front of the electorate.
Frank Herbert
#92. She's the One all right," she muttered. "Poor thing.
Frank Herbert
#93. Earth? Golden Age? Stilgar was irritated and puzzled. Why would Paul wish to discuss myths from the dawn of time?
Frank Herbert
#94. You cannot fix your gaze upon it!
Senses cannot record it.
No words describe it."
-Alia
Frank Herbert
#95. The more I find out, the more I realize that I don't know what's going on."
"How fortunate that you have discovered the way of wisdom," Leto said.
Frank Herbert
#97. A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.
Frank Herbert
#98. We will never forgive and we will never forget.
Frank Herbert
#99. I have been a stranger in a strange land, Halleck quoted. Paul stared at him, recognizing the quotation from the O.C. Bible, wondering: Does Gurney, too, wish an end to devious plots?
Frank Herbert
#100. Law of the Minimum: "The worst potential competition for any organism can come from its own kind. The species consumes necessities. Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount. The least favourable condition controls the rate of growth."
Frank Herbert
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