Frank Herbert Quotes

246 Sourced Quotes

History is a constant race between invention and catastrophe.

Frank Herbert
The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.

Frank Herbert
Membership in a conspiracy, as in an army, frees people from the sense of personal responsibility.

Frank Herbert
Many things we do naturally become difficult only when we try to make them intellectual subjects. It is possible to know so much about a subject that you become totally ignorant.

Frank Herbert
Most lives are a flight from selfhood. Most prefer the truths of the stable. You stick your head into the stanchions and munch contentedly until you die. Others use you for their purposes. Not once do you look outside the stable to lift your head and be your own creature.

Frank Herbert
You should never be in the company of anyone with whom you would not want to die.

Frank Herbert
A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people.

Frank Herbert
In my estimation, more misery has been created by reformers than by any other force in human history.

Frank Herbert
No matter how much we ask after the truth, self-awareness is often unpleasant. We do not feel kindly toward the Truthsayer.

Frank Herbert
If you live in bad faith, lies will appear to you like the truth.

Frank Herbert
I hear the wind blowing across the desert and I see the moons of a winter night rising like great ships in the void. To them I make my vow: I will be resolute and make an art of government; I will balance my inherited past and become a perfect storehouse of my relic memories. And I will be known for kindliness more than for knowledge. My face will shine down the corridors of time for as long as humans exist.

Frank Herbert
Governments can be useful to the governed only so long as inherent tendencies toward tyranny are restrained.

Frank Herbert
Machine makers always run the risk of becoming totally machine.

Frank Herbert
You can't build politics on love. People aren't concerned with love; it's too disordered. They prefer despotism. Too much freedom breeds chaos.

Frank Herbert
When we try to conceal our innermost drives, the entire being screams betrayal.

Frank Herbert
If we deny emotion, we lose all touch with our internal universe.

Frank Herbert
When I was writing Dune there was no room in my mind for concerns about the book's success or failure. I was concerned only with the writing. Six years of research had preceded the day I sat down to put the story together, and the interweaving of the many plot layers I had planned required a degree of concentration I had never before experienced.

Frank Herbert
To see eternity was to be exposed to eternity's whims, oppressed by endless dimensions.

Frank Herbert
Good subjects must feel guilty. The guilt begins as a feeling of failure. The good autocrat provides many opportunities for failure in the populace.

Frank Herbert
Humans live best when each has his place, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things. Destroy the place and destroy the person.

Frank Herbert
The act of saying that things exist that cannot be described in words shakes a universe where words are the supreme belief.

Frank Herbert
Intelligence takes chances with limited data in an arena where mistakes are not only possible but also necessary.

Frank Herbert
The most terrifying things in the universe came from human minds.

Frank Herbert
Unfortunately most criticism is by poseurs. They use their comments about someone else's work as a platform on which to strike poses. What they're really saying is: "Look at me! Look at me!"

Frank Herbert
Why is it that foolishness repeats itself with such monotonous precision?

Frank Herbert
It is said that there is a principle of conflict which originated with the single cell and has never deteriorated.

Frank Herbert
In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are somtimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshy sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleetingly aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use its proper name: Temporary.

Frank Herbert
Paired opposites define your longings and those longings imprison you.

Frank Herbert
Love is a very ancient force, which served its purpose in its day but no longer is essential for the survival of the species.

Frank Herbert
Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. The judgmental precedents of law function that way, littering your path with dead ends. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.

Frank Herbert