Frank Herbert Quotes

The tyranny of the minority cloaked in the mask of the majority,” Odrade called it, her voice exultant. “Downfall of democracy. Either overthrown by its own excesses or eaten away by bureaucracy.” Idaho could hear the Tyrant in that judgment. If history had any repetitive patterns, here was one. A drumbeat of repetition. First, a Civil Service law masked in the lie that it was the only way to correct demagogic excesses and spoils systems. Then the accumulation of power in places voters could not touch. And finally, aristocracy.

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

"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.

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

they’d chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation.

Natural selection has been described as an environment selectively screening for those who will have progeny. Where humans are concerned, though, this is an extremely limiting viewpoint. Reproduction by sex tends toward experiment and innovation. It raises many questions, including the ancient one about whether environment is a selective agent after the variation occurs, or whether environment plays a pre-selective role in determining the variations which it screens. Dune did not really answer those questions: it merely raised new questions which Leto and the Sisterhood may attempt to answer over the next five hundred generations. — THE DUNE CATASTROPHE AFTER HARQ AL-ADA

He mastered the inner world while holding the outer in contempt, and this led to catastrophe.

But the tripod upon which Eternity swings is composed of flesh and thought and emotion.

Grief is the price of victory,

So I quoted the First Law of Mentat at her: ‘A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

He who can destroy a thing has the real control of it.

It should be one of the tests,” the old woman said. “Humans are almost always lonely.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.

The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed. We feel threatened by such demands. “I already know the important things!”we say. Then Changer comes

You must teach me the way you thrust your worries aside and turn to practical matters.