Frank Herbert Quotes

Better the complexities one thought he knew than the complexities which defied understanding.

QUESTION: Who governs the governors?
ANSWER: Entropy.

Each of us is the enemy [...] to the other and to himself. That's what I mean: I'm the enemy within myself. Unless I master that enemy, I always lose.

Axiom: the best place to conserve your water is in your body. It keeps your energy up. You’re stronger. Trust your stillsuit.” She

How ignorant a man can become on a diet of managed history.

The waters which we spread upon the desert have become blood. Blood upon our land! Behold our desert which could
rejoice and blossom; it has lured the stranger and seduced him in our midst.
They come for violence! Their faces are closed up as for the last wind of
Kralizec! They gather the captivity of the sand. They suck up the abundance of
the sand, the treasure hidden in the depths. Behold them as they go forth to
their evil work. It is written: 'And I stood upon the sand, and I saw a beast
rise up out of that sand, and upon the head of that beast was the name of God!

"The future is a thing to be shaped," Scytale said. "Hold that thought, Princess."

How strange. You're more Gowachin than a Gowachin.

Whirling silence settled around Jessica. Every fiber of her body accepted the fact that something profound had happened to it. She felt that she was a conscious mote, smaller than any subatomic particle, yet capable of motion and of sensing her surroundings. Like an abrupt revelation — the curtains whipped away — she realized she had become aware of a psychokinesthetic extension of herself. She was the mote, yet not the mote.

Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself — a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred.

"Any religion circles like a planet around a sun which it must use for its energy, upon which it depends for its very existence."
Her voice came barely above a whisper: "What do you see in your sun, Lord?"
"A universe of many windows through which I may peer. Whatever the window frames, that is what I see."
"The future?"
"The universe is timeless at its roots and contains therefore all times and all futures."

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.

Does a populace 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? History already has answered that question. Every society in the ConSentiency today reflects the historical judgment that failure to provide full information for informed consent on such an issue represents an ultimate crime.

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

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