Frank Herbert Quotes

A leader is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals and a people reverts to a mob.

Technology is both a tool for helping humans and for destroying them. This is the paradox of our times which we're compelled to face.

Never attempt to reason with people who know they are right!

Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma.

The surest way to keep a secret is to make people believe they already know the answer.

A man is a fool not to put everything he has, at any given moment, into what he is creating.

The greatest and most important problems of life cannot be solved. They can only be outgrown.

Religions often partake of the myth of progress that shields us from the terrors of an uncertain future.

What do you despise? By this are you truly known.

When a creature has developed into one thing, he will choose death rather than change into his opposite.

Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere.

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.

A ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel.

The hearts of all men dwell in the same wilderness.

Anything less than abject submission has to have some attack in it.

The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed.

Producing perfection from imperfection is, after all, the highest of art forms.

That path leads ever down into stagnation.

Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.

The most important survival ability for any life form is the ability to change.

Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your own life.

Beware! The mind of the believer stagnates. It fails to grow outward into an unlimited, infinite universe.

What is the son but an extension of the father?

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

In 1054, the patriarch of Constantinople and the pope excommunicated each other. That was the end of holiness for both churches.

Try looking into that place where you dare not look! You'll find me there, staring out at you!

A popular man arouses the jealousy of the powerful.

Any man who retreats into a cave which has only one opening deserves to die.

Words are such gross machinery, so primitive and ambiguous.

Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.

He who can destroy a thing, can control a thing.

Knowing where the trap is-- that's the first step in evading it.

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

We faced it and did not resist. The storm passed through us and around us. It's gone, but we remain.

Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent natural regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it.

The real universe is always one step beyond logic.

Radicals are only to be feared when you try to suppress them. You must demonstrate that you will use the best of what they offer.

You should never be in the company of anyone with whom you would not want to die.

Power tends to isolate those who hold too much of it. Eventually, they lose touch with reality ... and fall.

Unused power was like a marionette with visible strings, nobody holding them. A compelling attraction: I could make it dance.

Madness in method, that's genius

Unfortunately most criticism is by poseurs. They use their comments about someone else's work as a platform on which to strike poses. What they're really saying is: "Look at me! Look at me!"

There has never been a truly selfless rebel, just hypocrites—conscious hypocrites or unconscious hypocrites, it’s all the same.

We never get far from wealth and all of its masks when we deal with power.

If I'd been born in my grandfather's time, I'd have made my grandfather's mistakes. Theres no doubt of it. I just don't want to make my grandfather's mistakes today.

I'm the well-trained fruit tree. Full of well-trained feelings and abilities and all of them grafted onto me

The only past which endures lies wordlessly within you.

Mankind has only one science… its the science of discontent.

I have come to believe that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.

You do not take from this universe. It grants you what it will.