Frank Herbert Quotes

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

Religion began as a female monopoly, wrested from them only after its social power became too dominant. Women were the first medical researchers and practitioners. There has never been any clear balance between the sexes because power goes with certain roles as it certainly goes with knowledge.

Duncan spoke quietly: 'Lucilla, if you touch me again without my permission, I will try to kill you. I will try so hard that you very likely will have to kill me.

We know the major conditions wherein this large populace may turn upon its keepers -
One: When they find a leader. This is the most volatile threat to the powerful; they must retain control of leaders.
Two: When the populace recognises its chains. Keep the populace blind and unquestioning.
Three: When the populace perceives a hope of escape from bondage. They must never even believe that escape is possible!

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.

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.

Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual.

-Words of Muad'dib by Princess Irulan.

I know a profound pattern humans deny with words even while their actions affirm it. They say they seek security and quiet, conditions they call peace. Even as they speak, they create seeds of turmoil and violence.

"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?"

Peace demands solutions, but we never reach living solutions; we only work toward them. A fixed solution is, by definition, a dead solution. The trouble with peace is that it tends to punish mistakes instead of rewarding brilliance.

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

But oh, the perils of leadership in a species so anxious to be told what to do. How little they knew of what they created by their demands. Leaders made mistakes. And those mistakes, amplified by the numbers who followed without questioning, moved inevitably toward great disasters.

This is the age of the shrug. He knows I've heard all of the stories about him and he doesn't care. Our civilization could well die of indifference within it before succumbing to external attack.

"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.

Governments may rise and fall for reasons which appear insignificant, Prince. What small events! An argument between two women . . . which way the wind blows on a certain day . . . a sneeze, a cough, the length of a garment or the chance collision of a fleck of sand and a courtier’s eye. It is not always the majestic concerns of Imperial ministers which dictate the course of history, nor is it necessarily the pontifications of priests which move the hands of God.