Quotes by Frank Herbert

What the eyes had seen could not be erased.

Wild Fremen said it well: Four things cannot be hidden -- love, smoke, a pillar of fire and a man striding across the open bled.

There will be sadness, Alia intoned. I remind you that all things are but beginning, forever beginning. Worlds wait to be conquered. Some within the sound of my voice will attain exalted destinies. You will sneer at the past, forgetting what I tell you now: within all differences there is unity.

The hunter does not seek dead game.

You do not beg the sun for mercy.-Mauddibs Travail from The Stilgar Commentary

Do you know what guerrillas often say? They claim that their rebellions are invulnerable to economic warfare because they have no economy, that they are parasitic on those they would overthrow. The fools merely fail to access the coin in which they must inevitably pay. The pattern is inexorable in its degenerative failures. You see it repeated in the systems of slavery, of welfare states, of caste-ridden religions, of socializing bureaucracies -- in any system in which creates and maintains dependencies. Too long a parasite and you cannot exist without a host.

As long as my Duke remains unmarried some of the Great Houses can still hope for alliance.

And loyalty is a valued commodity. It can be sold . . . not bought, but sold.

We have a disturbed relationship with our past which religion cannot explain. We are primitive in unexplainable ways, our lives woven of the familiar and the strange, the reasonable and the insane.

A popular man arouses the jealousy of the powerful.

How would we flood village and city with our information? The people must learn how well I govern them. How would they know if we didnt tell them?

Religion, too, is a weapon. What manner of weapon is religion when it becomes the government?

Police are inevitably corrupted. ... Police always observe that criminals prosper. It takes a pretty dull policeman to miss the fact that the position of authority is the most prosperous criminal position available.

Caution is the path to mediocrity. Gliding, passionless mediocrity is all that most people think they can achieve.

Chance is the nature of our universe. […] madness represents a chaotic reservoir of surprises. Some surprises can be valuable.

Hard tasks need hard ways.

He straightened, assuming an odd attitude of dignity – as though it were another mask.

The price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life--we went soft, we lost our edge.

The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.

One moment of incompetence can be fatal.