Frank Herbert Quotes

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

- Frank Herbert

The difference between sentiment and being sentimental is the following: Sentiment is when a driver swerves out of the way to avoid hitting a rabbit on the road. Being sentimental is when the same driver, when swerving away from the rabbit, hits a pedestrian.

- Frank Herbert

Enemies make you stronger, allies make you weaker.

- Frank Herbert

It is a wise man that does know the contented man is never poor, whilst the discontented man is never rich.

- Frank Herbert

The stakes in conflict do not change. Battle determines who will control the wealth or its equivalent.

- Frank Herbert

The proximity of a desirable thing tempts one to overindulgence. On that path lies danger.

- Frank Herbert

Religion often partakes of the myth of progress that shields us from the terrors of an uncertain future.

- Frank Herbert

When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual.

- 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

To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.

- Frank Herbert

Wealth is a tool of freedom, but the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.

- Frank Herbert

There is no escape - we pay for the violence of our ancestors.

- Frank Herbert

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.

- Frank Herbert

Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.

- Frank Herbert

Something cannot emerge from nothing.

- Frank Herbert

Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.

- Frank Herbert

To attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood. It is the attempt to see the Light without knowing the Darkness. It cannot be.

- Frank Herbert

The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.

- Frank Herbert

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

- 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

How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.

- Frank Herbert

Truth suffers from too much analysis.

- Frank Herbert

He who can destroy a thing, can control a thing.

- Frank Herbert

The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.

- Frank Herbert

Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?

- Frank Herbert

What do you despise? By this are you truly known.

- Frank Herbert

Kindness is the beginning of cruelty.

- Frank Herbert