Quotes by Frank Herbert

But one learns from books and reels only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.

We accept too damned many things on the explanations of people who could have good reasons for lying.

Fannie Mae had aroused his anger, then reduced his anger to verbal breast-beating, and finally to silent hurt. Still, the love remained. Why?

Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place.

What you of the CHOAM directorate seem unable to understand is that you seldom find real loyalties in commerce ... Men must want to do things of their own innermost drives. People, not commercial organisations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work, every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you overorganize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness — they cannot work and their civilization collapses.

CHOAM is business and business follows profits.

When a Truthsayers gifted by the drug, she can look many places in her memory - in her bodys memory. We look down so many avenues of the past... but only feminine avenues... Yet theres a place no Truthsayer can see. We are repelled by it, terrorized. It is said a man will come one day and find in the gift of the drug his inward eye. He will look where we cannot - into both feminine and masculine pasts... Many men have tried the drug... so many, but none has succeeded.They tried and failed, all of them?They tried and died.

This wise man observed that wealth is a tool of freedom. But the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.

Humans are almost always lonely.

Growth is limited by the necessity which is present in the least amount. And naturally, the least favorable condition controls the growth rate

Small souls who seek power over others first destroy the faith those others might have in themselves.

People always want something more than immediate joy or that deeper sense called happiness. This is one of the secrets by which we shape the fulfillment of our designs. The something more assumes amplified power with people who cannot give it a name or who (most often the case) do not even suspect its existence. Most people only react unconsciously to such hidden forces. Thus, we have only to call a calculated something more into existence, define it and give it shape, then people will follow.

Every man carries his own past with him, Hayt said.

Only fools prefer the past!

Paul looked down at the hand that had known pain, and then up to the Reverend Mother. The sound of her voice contained a difference than from any other voicing his experience. The words were outlined in brilliance. There was an edge to them.

The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called spannungsbogen -- which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.

Black is a blind remembering, she thought. You listen for pack sounds, for the cries of those who hunted your ancestors in a past so ancient only your most primitive cells remember. The ears see. The nostrils see.

Then she said a good ruler has to learn his world’s language, that it’s different for every world. And I thought she meant they didn’t speak Galach on Arrakis, but she said that wasn’t it at all. She said she meant the language of the rocks and growing things, the language you don’t hear just with your ears. And I said that’s what Dr. Yueh calls the Mystery of Life.” Hawat chuckled. “How’d that sit with her?” “I think she got mad. She said the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience. So I quoted the First Law of Mentat at her: A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

He who controls the spice controls the universe.

I am a leg of the death tripod that will destroy our foes.