Frank Herbert Quotes

246 Sourced Quotes

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

Frank Herbert
Democracy is susceptible to being led astray by having scapegoats paraded in front of the electorate.

Frank Herbert
Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed.

Frank Herbert
Is it possible this triviality is a code of some sort? the Brain wondered. But how could it be... unless there's more to these emotional inconsequentials and this talk of a God than appears on the surface?
The Brain had begun its career in logics as a pragmatic atheist. Now doubts began to creep into its computations, and it classified doubt as an emotion.

Frank Herbert
If we define Futurism as an exploration beyond accepted limits, then the nature of limiting systems becomes the first object of exploration.

Frank Herbert
Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.

Frank Herbert
[Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, 'I am not the kind of person I want to be.' It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.] - Last words of Toure Bomoko

Frank Herbert
We never completely escape the teachers of our childhood nor any of the patterns that formed us.

Frank Herbert
It wasn't the kind of answer he'd expected — too subtly penetrating and leaving too much uncommitted. He reminded himself that it was difficult to control uncommitted people. Once a man had invested his energies, he could be twisted and turned at will... but if the man held back, conserved those energies...

Frank Herbert
Fear is the penalty of consciousness forced to stare at itself.

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

Frank Herbert
Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what's incomplete and saying: 'Now, it's complete because it's ended here.' - from "Collected Sayings of Maud'Dib'' by the Princess Irulan

Frank Herbert
A creature who has spent his life creating one particular representation of his selfdom will die rather than become the antithesis of that representation

Frank Herbert
The current utopian ideal being touted by people as politically diverse (on the surface, but not underneath) as President Richard M. Nixon and Senator Edward M. Kennedy goes as follows — no deeds of passion allowed, no geniuses, no criminals, no imaginative creators of the new. Satisfaction may be gained only in carefully limited social interactions, in living off the great works of the past. There must be limits to any excitement. Drug yourself into a placid "norm." Moderation is the key word…

Frank Herbert
I live in an apocalyptic dream. My steps fit into it so precisely that I fear most of all I will grow bored reliving the thing so exactly.

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

Frank Herbert
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.

Frank Herbert
By the time we awaken faintly to the awareness that we have been socially conditioned, we find ourselves so indoctrinated that it's difficult, if not impossible, to break the old patterns... Survival pressures demanding that we evolve, grow, and change, however, continue to proliferate. We don't want to change, but the floodgates open abruptly and we are overwhelmed.
Crisis!

Frank Herbert
If you ask "Should we be in space?" you ask a nonsense question. We are in space. We will be in space.

Frank Herbert
Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.

Frank Herbert
One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could be the general and widespread understanding of how severely limited logic really is.

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

Frank Herbert
When you think to take determination of your fate into your own hands, that is the moment you can be crushed. Be cautious.

Frank Herbert
It was mostly sweet," he whispered, "and you were the sweetest of all.

Frank Herbert
She looked at patches of blackness. Black is a blind remembering, she thought.

Frank Herbert
You can say things which cannot be done. This is elementary. The trick is to keep attention focused on what is said and not on what can be done.

Frank Herbert
The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy.

Frank Herbert
We have eternity, beloved." "You may have eternity. I have only now." "But this is eternity.

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

Frank Herbert
Control the coinage and the courts — let the rabble have the rest.

Frank Herbert