Quotes from Frank Herbert

He found that he no longer could hate the Bene Gesserit or the Emperor or even the Harkonnens. They were all caught up in the need of their race to renew its scattered inheritance, to cross and mingle and infuse their bloodlines in a great new pooling of genes. And the race knew only one sure way for this—the ancient way, the tried and certain way that rolled over everything in its path: jihad. Surely

Beware jargon. It usually hides ignorance and carries little knowledge.

It is another kind of marriage—the marriage of privilege and duty. It is the aristocrat's explanation and his excuse.

What's a gom jabbar?

You seldom learn the names of the truly wealthy and powerful. You see only their spokesmen. The political arena makes a few exceptions to this but does not reveal the full power structure.

How ignorant a man can become on a diet of managed history.

Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free.

A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That's why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.

The wise despot...maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

Mercy is a chimera.

It's an old, old trick of autocratic rule," Idaho said. "Alia knows it well. Good subjects must feel guilty. The guilt begins as a feeling of failure. The good autocrat provides many opportunities for failure in the populace.

governments lie to protect themselves and they make incredibly stupid decisions.

Each of us is the enemy [...] to the other and to himself. That's what I mean: I'm the enemy within myself. Unless I master that enemy, I always lose.

QUESTION: Who governs the governors? ANSWER: Entropy.

Bir geceyi uyan?k geçirmek, ömre bir gün eklemektir.

How strange. You're more Gowachin than a Gowachin.

This is the perspective which you create with your own belief, and beliefs can be manipulated by imagination. You've learned only a limited way of looking at the universe. Now you must make the universe your own creation.

I'm the well-trained fruit tree, he thought. Full of well-trained feelings and abilities and all of them grafted onto me—all bearing for someone else to pick.

I stood upon the sand of the sea and saw a beast rise up out of the sea…and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.

That girl! She was like a touch of destiny

Whirling silence settled around Jessica. Every fiber of her body accepted the fact that something profound had happened to it. She felt that she was a conscious mote, smaller than any subatomic particle, yet capable of motion and of sensing her surroundings. Like an abrupt revelation—the curtains whipped away—she realized she had become aware of a psychokinesthetic extension of herself. She was the mote, yet not the mote.

Cynicism! That, no doubt is a greater crime than heresy.

It is not the present which influences the future, thou fool, but the future which forms the present. You have it all backward. Since the future is set, an unfolding of events which will assure that future is fixed and inevitable.

Stilgar put a hand on Idaho's shoulder. "All men are interlopers, old friend.