Frank Herbert

We are questioning more than the philosophy behind our dependence upon limited and limiting systems. We question the power structures that have grown up around such systems.

— Frank Herbert

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.

— Frank Herbert

Technology is both a tool for helping humans and for destroying them. This is the paradox of our times which we're compelled to face.

— Frank Herbert

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

One of the most important things is corporate politics. Big corporations are bureaucracies that often promote people who are best at covering their asses. Such people run scared, fearful of any suggestion they can make mistakes. And they surround themselves with others who run the same way. Don't take risks. Find out what succeeds and copy it.

— Frank Herbert

Ramsey could contain the question no longer. "What's your definition of sanity, Skipper?" "The ability to swim," said Sparrow...."That means the sane person has to understand currents, has to know what's required in different waters."

— Frank Herbert

I must not fear.

— Frank Herbert

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. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.

— Frank Herbert

There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors.

— Frank Herbert

Without coming fully awake, Rhin felt his presence beside her, experienced a primitive demand for his protective masculinity. She nestled against him, murmured, "its so hot. Doesn’t it ever cool off?"

— Frank Herbert

It wasn’t the kind of answer he'd expected — too subtly penetrating and leaving too much uncommitted. He reminded himself that it was difficult to control uncommitted people. Once a man had invested his energies, he could be twisted and turned at will... but if the man held back, conserved those energies...

— Frank Herbert

My father once told me that respect for truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. 'Something cannot emerge from nothing,' he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable 'the truth' can be.

— Frank Herbert

A person cries out against life because it's lonely, and because life's broken off from whatever created it. But no matter how much you hate life, you love it, too. It's like a caldron boiling with everything you have to have — but very painful to the lips.

— Frank Herbert

Is it possible this triviality is a code of some sort? the Brain wondered. But how could it be ... unless there's more to these emotional inconsequentials and this talk of a God than appears on the surface? The Brain had begun its career in logics as a pragmatic atheist. Now doubts began to creep into its computations, and it classified doubt as an emotion.

— Frank Herbert

A slave is one who must produce wealth for another," the Brain said. "There is only one true wealth in all the universe. I have given you some of it. I have given your father and your mate some of it. And your friends. This wealth is living time. Time. Are we slaves because we have given you more time to live?

— Frank Herbert

We sift reality through screens composed of ideas. (And such ideas have their roots in older ideas.) Such idea systems are necessarily limited by language, by the ways we can describe them. That is to say: language cuts the grooves in which our thoughts move. If we seek new validity forms (other laws and other orders) we must step outside language.

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

When a wise man does not understand, he says: "I do not understand." The fool and the uncultured are ashamed of their ignorance. They remain silent when a question could bring them wisdom.

— Frank Herbert

Do you want an absolute prediction? Then you want only today, and you reject tomorrow. You are the ultimate conservative. You are trying to hold back movement in an infinitely changing universe. The verb to be does make idiots of us all.

— Frank Herbert

The scarce water of Dune is an exact analog of oil scarcity. CHOAM is OPEC.

— Frank Herbert

Where is the weapon with which I enforce your bondage? You give it to me every time you open your mouth.

— Frank Herbert

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

Learning a language represents training in the delusions of that language.

— Frank Herbert

Providence and Manifest Destiny are synonyms often invoked to support arguments based on wishful thinking.

— Frank Herbert

That is one of the Law's purposes, of course: to test the qualities of those who choose to employ it.

— Frank Herbert

Does a population have informed consent when a ruling minority acts in secret to ignite a war, doing this to justify the existence of the minority's forces? […] failure to provide full information for informed consent on such an issue represents an ultimate crime.

— 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

Governments always commit their entire populations when the demands grow heavy enough. By their passive acceptance, these populations become accessories to whatever is done in their name.

— Frank Herbert

The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture - it begins in the dignity with which we treat the dead

— Frank Herbert

The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it.

— 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

Whether a thought is spoken or not it is a real thing and it has power," Tuek said. "You might find the line between life and death among the Fremen to be too sharp and quick.

— 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

There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors.

— Frank Herbert

The flesh surrenders itself. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not...yet, I occurred.

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

You don't know what it's like to hunt the future

— Frank Herbert

Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.

— 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

Where is there substance in a universe composed of events?" Paul asked. "Is there a final answer? Doesn't each solution produce new questions?"

— Frank Herbert

The flesh surrenders itself, he thought. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred there waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not . . . yet, I occurred.

— Frank Herbert

Whether a thought is spoken or not it is a real thing and it has power," Tuek said. "You might find the line between life and death among the Fremen to be too sharp and quick.

— Frank Herbert

Do you wrestle with dreams?

— Frank Herbert

I drove my feet through a desert

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

My lungs taste the air of Time

— Frank Herbert

Do you wrestle with dreams?

— Frank Herbert

This group is composed of those for whom belief in saucers is tantamount to religion...They believe men from outer space will step in on Earth "before it's too late," put a stop to the atomic bomb threat "by their superior powers," and enforce perpetual peace "for the good of the universe"...

— Frank Herbert

Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.

— Frank Herbert

It's rooted in the fears to which all men are heir and, thus, deserves sympathy, not censure or laughter. The dream may be out of touch with history, but it's a good dream, and it doesn't appear to have been used to bilk gullible widows out of their savings. Never mind that we have a consistent record of slaughtering our messiahs. Look beyond the wacky arguments to the motivation — that sense of brotherhood which is all that has ever saved mankind from going over the brink.

— Frank Herbert

The thing we must do intensely is be human together. People are more important than things. We must get together. The best thing humans can have going for them is each other. We have each other. We must reject everything which humiliates us. Humans are not objects of consumption. We must develop an absolute priority of humans ahead of profit — any humans ahead of any profit. Then we will survive. … Together.

— Frank Herbert

There are no uncharted isles here where we can run away to sunshine and sparkling white beaches. We have just this one world, and on these pages we're beginning to get a feeling for the gigantic physical project confronting us. Our awakening is touched with dismay; we must come to terms with this world or it will terminate us. When we speak of defending the environment, we are speaking of defending our own lives.

— Frank Herbert

Ecology is a dirty seven-letter word to many people. They are like heavy sleepers refusing to be aroused. "Leave me alone! It's not time to get up yet!"

— Frank Herbert

When I was quite young... I began to suspect there must be flaws in my sense of reality. It seemed to my dim sense of confusion that things often blended one into another, and the Law of Excluded Middle merely opened up a void wherein anything was possible. But I had been produced to focus on objects (things) and not on systems (processes).

— Frank Herbert

If we define Futurism as an exploration beyond accepted limits, then the nature of limiting systems becomes the first object of exploration.

— Frank Herbert

By the time we awaken faintly to the awareness that we have been socially conditioned, we find ourselves so indoctrinated that it's difficult, if not impossible, to break the old patterns … Survival pressures demanding that we evolve, grow, and change, however, continue to proliferate. We don't want to change, but the floodgates open abruptly and we are overwhelmed.Crisis!

— Frank Herbert

Science fiction, because it ventures into no man's lands, tends to meet some of the requirements posed by Jung in his explorations of archetypes, myth structures and self-understanding. It may be that the primary attraction of science fiction is that it helps us understand what it means to be human.

— Frank Herbert

If you ask "Should we be in space?" you ask a nonsense question. We are in space. We will be in space.

— Frank Herbert

The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action in mind.

— Frank Herbert