Frank Herbert quotes:

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

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

Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.

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

To attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood. It is the attempt to see the Light without knowing the Darkness. It cannot be.

Religion often partakes of the myth of progress that shields us from the terrors of an uncertain future.

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.

The most important survival ability for any life form is the ability to change.

Kindness is the beginning of cruelty.

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.

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

It is a wise man that does know the contented man is never poor, whilst the discontented man is never rich.

Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, absolute power attracts the corruptible.

Enemies make you stronger, allies make you weaker.

Truth suffers from too much analysis.

I remember friends from wars all but we forgot. All of them distilled into each wound we caught. Those wounds are all painful places where we fought. Battles never left behind, ones we never sought. What is it that we spent and what was it we bought?

Nothing wins more loyalty for a leader than an air of bravura, the Duke said. I, therefore, cultivate an air of bravura.

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."

Wealth is a tool of freedom, but the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.

The most persistent principles in the universe are accident and error.

The oppressed always learned from and copied the oppressor. When the tables were turned, the stage was set for another round of revenge and violence -- roles reversed. And reversed and reversed ad nauseam.

When strangers meet, great allowance should be made for differences of custom and training.

[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.] - Last words of Toure Bomoko

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

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.

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.

Every judgment teeters on the brink of error.

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

TO THE LADY JESSICA-May this place give you as much pleasure as it has given me. Please permit the room to convey a lesson we learned from the same teachers: the proximity of a desirable thing tempts one to overindulgence. On that path lies danger. My kindest wishes,MARGOT LADY FENRING

Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class -- whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy."

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?

Every civilization must contend with an unconscious force which can block, betray, or countermand almost any conscious intention of the collectivity.

In 1054, the patriarch of Constantinople and the pope excommunicated each other. That was the end of holiness for both churches.

Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?

Always prepare secondary ways of dealing with problems.

What do you despise? By this are you truly known.

The highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences

Question: Who governs the governors? Answer: Entropy

Face your fears or they will climb over your back.

When your opponent fears you, then's the moment when you give the fear its own rein, give it the time to work on him. Let it become terror. The terrified man fights himself. Eventually, he attacks in desperation. That is the most dangerous moment, but the terrified man can be trusted usually to make a fatal mistake. You are being trained here to detect these mistakes and use them.

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.

Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who so survive.

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

When politics and religion are intermingled, a people is suffused with a sense of invulnerability, and gathering speed in their forward charge, they fail to see the cliff ahead of them

We are generalists. You can't draw neat lines around planet-wide problems. Planetology is a cut-and-fit science.

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

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.

A person cries out in life because it's lonely and because life's been 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.

These are illusions of popular history which successful religion must promote: Evil men never prosper; only the brave deserve the fair; honesty is the best policy; actions speak louder than words; virtue always triumpths; a good deed is its own rewards; any bad human can be reformed; religious talismans protect one from demon possession; only females understand the ancient mysteries; the rich are doomed to unhappiness

No matter how exotic human civilization becomes, no matter the developments of life and society nor the complexity of the machine/human interface, there always come interludes of lonely power when the course of humankind, the very future of humankind, depends upon the relatively simple actions of single individual.

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.

Beware! The mind of the believer stagnates. It fails to grow outward into an unlimited, infinite universe.

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?

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.

All men seek to be enlightened. Religion is but the most ancient and honorable way in which men have striven to make sense out of God's universe. Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.

Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.

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

The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we do to each other.

Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. The judgmental precedents of law function that way, littering your path with dead ends. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.

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

Life is a mask through which the universe expresses itself.

A voice hissed: "He sheds tears!" It was taken around the ring "Usal gives moisture to the dead!" He felt fingers touch his damp cheek, heard the awed whispers.

To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.

The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.

Law always chooses sides on the basis of enforcement power. Morality and legal niceties have little to do with it when the real question is: Who has the clout?

The proximity of a desirable thing tempts one to overindulgence. On that path lies danger.

Here lies a toppled god. His fall was not a small one. We did but build his pedestal, A narrow and a tall one.

The difference between sentiment and being sentimental is the following: Sentiment is when a driver swerves out of the way to avoid hitting a rabbit on the road. Being sentimental is when the same driver, when swerving away from the rabbit, hits a pedestrian.

Justice belongs to those who claim it, but let the claimant beware lest he create new injustice by his claim and thus set the bloody pendulum of revenge into its inexorable motion

I give you the chameleon, whose ability to blend itself into the background tells you all you need to know about the roots of ecology and the foundations of a personal identity

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.

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.

Justice? Who asks for justice? We make our own justice ... Let us not rail about justice as long as we have arms and the freedom to use them.

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

When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong - faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's to late.

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

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

I cry for those not yet dead

In politics, the tripod is he most unstable of all structures. It's be bad enough without the complication of a feudal trade culture which turns its back on most science.

Holiness has replaced love in your religion!

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

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.

A single obscure decision of prophecy, perhaps the choice of one word over another, could change the entire aspect of the future. He tells us "The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.

It is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past.

On Caladan, we ruled with sea and air power," the Duke said. "Here, we must scrabble for desert power. This is your inheritance, Paul.

You must learn to rule. It's something none of your ancestors learned.

My father rules an entire planet.""He's losing it.

We had something few experience. We were joined in our strengths rather than in our weaknesses.

Behold, as a wild ass in the desert, go I forth to my work.

To exist is to stand out, away from the background," The Preacher said. "You aren't thinking or really existing unless you're willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgment of your existence.

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.

The stakes in conflict do not change. Battle determines who will control the wealth or its equivalent.

Hard tasks need hard ways.

I succumbed to the lure of the oracle, he thought. And he sensed that succumbing to this lure might be to fix himself upon a single-track life. Could it be, he wondered, that the oracle didn't tell the future? Could it be that the oracle made the future?

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.

Education is no substitute for intelligence.

One learns from books and example only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.

Proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you have always known.

Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.

Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.

The hunter does not seek dead game.

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.

It's very difficult convincing the young of anything. They're born knowing so much.

I'm the well-trained fruit tree. Full of well-trained feelings and abilities and all of them grafted onto me

There is only one true wealth in all the universe--living time.

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

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

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.

She thought of the boy's features as an exquisite distillation out of random patterns-endless queues of happenstance meeting at this nexus.

I am not the river I am the net.

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.

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

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.

And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning 'That path leads ever down into stagnation.

That path leads ever down into stagnation.

Anything less than abject submission has to have some attack in it.

We can say that Maud'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.

Religions often partake of the myth of progress that shields us from the terrors of an uncertain future.

To come under siege was the inevitable fate of power.

The undeserving maintain power by promoting hysteria.