Quotes from Frank Herbert

Sir, I honor and respect the personal dignity of any man who respects my dignity.

From the Hive Manual. The relationship between ecology and evolution is extremely close, deeply implicated in organic changes among a given animal population, and profoundly sensitive to the density of numbers within a given habitat. Our adaptations aim to increase the population tolerance, to permit a human density ten to twelve times greater than is currently considered possible. Out of this, we will get our survival variations.

The people must learn how well I govern them. How would they know if we didn't tell them?

If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic. —T. Robbins

All rebellions are ordinary and an ultimate bore. They are copied out of the same pattern, one much like another. The driving force is adrenalin addiction and the desire to gain personal power. All rebels are closet aristocrats. That's why I can convert them so easily. Why

But it's a human trait that when we encounter personal problems, those things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan. We tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual, deep-seated thing that's really chewing on us.

When the means of great violence are widespread, nothing is more dangerous to the powerful than that they create outrage and injustice, for outrage and injustice will certainly ignite retaliation in kind. — BuSab Manual

Men looked at their gods and their rituals and saw that both were filled with that most terrible of all equations: fear over ambition.

People aren't concerned with love; it's too disordered. They prefer despotism. Too much freedom breeds chaos. We can't have that, can we? And how do you make despotism lovable?

My son has the Atreides sincerity... He has that tremendous, almost naive honor-and what a powerful force that truly is.

The thing the ecologically illiterate don't understand about an ecosystems is that it is a system…that's why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.

Feints within feints within feints.

Sad? Nonsense! Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place." He glanced at the charts on the table. "And Arrakis is just another place.

It should be one of the tests," the old woman said. "Humans are almost always lonely.

Something compelling and attractive surrounded walking anonymously at night in the streets of Arrakeen.

There's no such thing as equal justice anywhere. It's unsettling to a society when you try to achieve such a false balance.

One who rules assumes irrevocable responsibility for the ruled. You are a husbandman. This demands, at times, a selfless act of love which may only be amusing to those you rule.

The Golden Path demands it. And what is the Golden Path? you ask. It is the survival of humankind, nothing more nor less. We

Irreverence is a most necessary ingredient of religion," Leto said. "Not to speak of its importance in philosophy. Irreverence is the only way left to us for testing our universe.

what other society would have such a natural regard for her privacy and comfort that the giver would intrude only enough to deposit the gift and not inflict her with the donor?

What happens when you think like a Fremen? 'You remember that you should never be in company that you wouldn't want to die with.

They tend to forget that nothing in a polarized universe can exist without its opposite being present. —

Thinking you knew something was a sure way to blind yourself. It was not growing up that slowly applied brakes to learning (Mentats were taught) but an accumulation of "things I know." New

Muad'Dib must always be that inner outrage against the complacently powerful, against the charlatans and the dogmatic fanatics. It is that inner outrage which must have its say because Muad'Dib taught us one thing above all others: that humans can endure only in a fraternity of social justice.