Frank Herbert Quotes

The past is no farther away than your pillow.

Another might have missed the tension, but she had trained him in the Bene Gesserit Way - in the minutiae of observation.

To use raw power is to make yourself infinitely vulnerable to greater powers.

It’s an old, old trick of autocratic rule,” Idaho said. “Alia knows it well. Good subjects must feel guilty. The guilt begins as a feeling of failure. The good autocrat provides many opportunities for failure in the populace.

Growth is limited by the necessity which is present in the least amount. And naturally, the least favorable condition controls the growth rate

Do you want me to say that men create gods to enforce their definitions of good and evil?

We do not teach history; we recreate the experience. We follow the chain of consequences - the tracks of the beast in its forest. Look behind our words and you see the broad sweep of social behavior that no historian has ever touched.

Isn’t it odd how we misunderstand the hidden unity of kindness and cruelty?” Jessica

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

If I always behave with propriety, no matter what it costs me to suppress my own desires, then that is the measure of me. Such is the essence of self-control.

Have you noticed, Stil, how beautiful the young women are this year?

Can you remember your first taste of spice?” “It tasted like cinnamon.” “But never twice the same,” he said. “It’s like life — it presents a different face each time you take it. Some hold that the spice produces a learned-flavor reaction. The body, learning a thing is good for it, interprets the flavor as pleasurable — slightly euphoric. And, like life, never to be truly synthesized.

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).

People always want something more than immediate joy or that deeper sense called happiness. This is one of the secrets by which we shape the fulfillment of our designs. The something more assumes amplified power with people who cannot give it a name or who (most often the case) do not even suspect its existence. Most people only react unconsciously to such hidden forces. Thus, we have only to call a calculated something more into existence, define it and give it shape, then people will follow.

"We will not run," Paul said. "We'll move with dignity. We'll do what must be done."