Quotes by Frank Herbert

Dont give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the heros facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem. It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced — in a word, insane.

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.

I realize that humans cannot bear very much reality. Most lives are a flight from selfhood. Most prefer the truths of the stable. You stick your heads into the stanchions and munch contentedly until you die. Others use you for their purposes. Not once do you live outside the stable to lift your head and be your own creature. MuadDib came to tell you about that. Without understanding his message, you cannot revere him!

A ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel... he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men... a good ruler has to learn his worlds language... its different for every world... the language of the rocks and growing things... the language you dont hear just with your ears... the Mystery of Life... not a problem to solve, but a reality to experience... Understanding must move with the flow of the process.

The child who refuses to travel in the fathers harness, this is the symbol of mans most unique capability. I do not have to be what my father was. I do not have to obey my fathers rules or even believe everything he believed. It is my strength as a human that I can make my own choices of what to believe and what not to believe, of what to be and what not to be.

Each of us comes into being knowing who he is and what he is supposed to do. ... Small children know, Leto said. Its only after adults have confused them that children hide this knowledge even from themselves.

We had something few experience. We were joined in our strengths rather than in our weaknesses.

The people who demand that the oracle predict for them really want to know next year’s price on whalefur or something equally mundane. None of them wants an instant-by-instant prediction of his personal life.

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.

It is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past.

Im going to rub your faces in things you try to avoid. I dont find it strange that all you want to believe is only that which comforts you. How else do humans invent the traps which betray us into mediocrity? How else do we define cowardice?

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

The great mass of humankind possesses an unmistakable unit-identity. It can be one thing. It can act as a single organism.

At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers. Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play. For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events. If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order.

My Uncle Malky always said the Lord Leto never responded to prayer. He said the Lord Leto looked on prayer as attempted coercion, a form of violence against the chosen god, telling the immortal what to do: Give me a miracle, God, or I wont believe in you!

Dangers lurk in all systems. Systems incorporate the unexamined beliefs of their creators. Adopt a system, accept its beliefs, and you help strengthen the resistance to change

Do actions agree with words? Theres your measure of reliability. Never confine yourself to the words.

To accept a little death is worse than death itself.

He felt the inability to grieve as a terrible flaw.

We can say that MuadDib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn.