Frank Herbert Quotes

No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero

Peace demands solutions, but we never reach living solutions; we only work toward them. A fixed solution is, by definition, a dead solution. The trouble with peace is that it tends to punish mistakes...

People, not commercial organizations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work. Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize huma...

Prisons are needed only to provide the illusion that courts and police are effective. They’re a kind of job insurance.

Shield! the old woman snapped. You well know the weakness there! Shield your son too much, Jessica, and he’ll not grow strong enough to fulfill any destiny.

Something compelling and attractive surrounded walking anonymously at night in the streets of Arrakeen.

The body, learning a thing is good for it, interprets the flavor as pleasurable—slightly euphoric. And, like life, never to be truly synthesized.

The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.

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 mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.

The pitfall of Bene Gesserit training, she reminded herself, lay in the powers granted: such powers predisposed one to vanity and pride. But power deluded those who used it. One tended to believe powe...

There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it’s almost imposs...

There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times to develop psychic muscles. -- Muad'Dib

There was a man who sat each day looking out through a narrow vertical opening where a single board had been removed from a tall wooden fence. Each day a wild ass of the desert passed outside the fenc...

They displayed a sophistication in warfare as good as anything he had ever encountered, and he had been trained by the best fighters in the universe then seasoned in battles where only the superior fe...

This is the age of the shrug. He knows I've heard all of the stories about him and he doesn't care. Our civilization could well die of indifference within it before succumbing to external attack.

To use raw power is to make yourself infinitely vulnerable to greater powers.

What we should have done was test the gift first. We should have probed for dangers. We were too bedazzled by it, though.

When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement becomes headlong—faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obsta...

When your opponent fears you, then’s the moment when you give the fear its own rein, give it the time to work on him. Let it become terror. The terrified man fights himself. Eventually, he attacks in...