Frank Herbert Quotes

A stone is heavy and the sand is weighty; but a fool's wrath is heavier than them both.

One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim.

When you imagine mistakes, there can be no self-defense.

You do not beg the sun for mercy.

-Maud'dib's Travail from The Stilgar Commentary

There's hope left in these dusty chords. There's a song left in our rusty hearts. We are torn and frayed but love remains.

Enemies strengthen you. Allies weaken.

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

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

I don’t think it’s quite that simple. Some people never observe anything, Life just happens to them. They get by on little more than a kind of dumb persistence, and they resist with anger and resentment anything that might lift them out of that false serenity.

Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed.

Every judgment teeters on the brink of error,” Leto explained. “To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy.

"The problem of leadership is inevitably: Who will play God?"
Muad'Dib

The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.

To be a god can ultimately become boring and degrading. There'd be reason enough for the invention of free will! A god might wish to escape into sleep and be alive only in the unconscious projections of his dream-creatures.