Quotes from Frank Herbert

There is no measuring Muad'Dib's motives by ordinary standards. In the moment of his triumph, he saw the death prepared for him, yet he accepted the treachery. Can you say he did this out of a sense of justice? Whose justice, then? Remember, we speak now of the Muad'Dib who ordered battle drums made from his enemies' skins, the Muad'Dib who denied the conventions of his ducal past with a wave of the hand, saying merely: 'I am the Kwisatz Haderach. That is reason enough.

Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent mutual regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it.

Sometimes I wonder about Piter, the Baron said. I cause pain out of necessity, but he...I swear he takes a positive delight in it. -Baron Vladimir

You who have defeated us say to yourselves that Babylon is fallen and its works have been overturned. I say to you still that man remains on trial, each man in his own dock. Each man is a little war.

Is God troubled?" And her companion replied: "The sins of this universe would trouble anyone.

I told him that to endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe.

People want order, this kind or some other. They sit in the prison of their hungers and see that war has become the sport of the rich. That's a dangerous form of sophistication. It's disorderly.

Arrakis makes us moral and ethical.

You do not take from this universe, he thought. It grants what it will.

Prisons are needed only to provide the illusion that courts and police are effective.

All rebels are closet aristocrats. That's why I can convert them so easily.

Tell me of thine eyes And I will tell thee of thy heart. Tell me of thy feet And I will tell thee of thy hands. Tell me of thy sleeping And I will tell thee of thy waking. Tell me of thy desires And I will tell thee of thy need.

In the wrong hands," Leto said, "monolithic centralized power is a dangerous and volatile instrument." - "And your hands are the right ones?

The difference between a good administrator and a bad one is about five heartbeats. Good administrators make immediate choices.

I have been a stranger in a strange land, Halleck quoted. Paul stared at him, recognizing the quotation from the O.C. Bible, wondering: Does Gurney, too, wish an end to devious plots?

Growing older is to grow more wicked.

A world is supported by four things... the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing...without a ruler who knows the art of ruling.

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

Every civilization depends on the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness-- they cannot work and their civilization collapses

Where is Alia?' she asked. 'Out doing what any good Fremen child should be doing in such times,' Paul said. 'She's killing enemy wounded...

The past may show the right way to behave if you live in the past, Stil, but circumstances change.

Remember that there exists a certain malevolence about the formation of any social order. It is the struggle for existence by an artificial entity. Despotism and slavery hover at the edges. Many injuries occur and, thus, the need for laws. The law develops its own power structure, creating more wounds and new injustices. Such trauma can be healed by cooperation, not by confrontation. The summons to cooperate identifies the healer.

The hunter does not seek dead game.

Those who would repeat the past must control the teaching of history. —Bene Gesserit Coda