Quotes from Frank Herbert

Evidence! What is evidence except those things you are allowed to perceive? That's what Law tries to control: carefully managed reality.

your religion real when it costs you nothing and carries no risk? Is your religion real when you fatten upon it? Is your religion real when you commit atrocities in its name? Whence comes your downward degeneration from the original revelation? Answer me, Priest!

The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed. We feel threatened by such demands. "I already know the important things!" we say. Then Changer comes and throws our old ideas away. —THE ZENSUFI MASTER

Never travel alone

You see, we often get noncreative leaders, people most interested in preserving their own positions. They flock around centers of power. Such centers attract people who can be corrupted. That is a more descriptive observation than to say simply that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The three legs of the agreement-tripod are desire, data and doubt. Accuracy and honesty have little to do with it.

It requires good government. That does not depend upon laws or precedent, but upon the personal qualities of whoever governs.

Nothing in the sadness at her death is too high a price to pay for the love we shared.

Paul heard his mother's grief and felt the emptiness within himself. I have no grief , he thought. Why? Why? He felt the inability to grieve as a terrible flaw.

The Tleilaxu secret must be in their sperm. Our tests prove that their sperm does not carry forward in a straight genetic fashion. Gaps occur. Every Tleilaxu we have examined has hidden his inner self from us. They are naturally immune to an Ixian Probe! Secrecy at the deepest levels, that is their ultimate armor and their ultimate weapon.   —Bene Gesserit Analysis, Archives Code: BTXX441WOR       On

Jessica, have you ever stopped hating me?" the old woman asked. "I both love and hate you," Jessica said. "The hate—that's from pains I must never forget. The love—that's…." "Just the basic fact," the old woman said

It should be one of the tests," the old woman said. "Humans are almost always lonely. Now summon the boy. He's had a long, frightening day. But he's had time to think and remember, and I must ask the other questions about these dreams of his.

Expediency was the first word in his catechism, although he gave proper lip-service to the precepts of the Butlerians. Machines could not be fashioned in the image of a man's mind, he said, but he betrayed by every action that he preferred machines to men, statistics to individuals, the faraway general view to the intimate personal touch requiring imagination and initiative.

Nothing on this planet had so forcefully hammered into her the ultimate value of water. Not the water-sellers, not the dried skins of the natives, not stillsuits or the rules of water discipline. Here there was a substance more precious than all others—it was life itself and entwined all around with symbolism and ritual. Water.

Desire brings the participants together. Data sets the limits of their dialogue. Doubt frames the questions.

He thought: Jessica, mother of Muad'Dib and grandmother of these royal twins, returns to our planet today. Why does she end her self-imposed exile at this time? Why does she leave the softness and security of Caladan for the dangers of Arrakis?

One can contemplate the Emperor and his powers comfortably if one remembers that all things are finite

Le esplosioni sono anche compressioni del tempo. I mutamenti osservabili nell'universo naturale sono tutti esplosivi, entro certi limiti e sotto certi punti di vista; altrimenti non li notereste. Un mutamento continuo e uniforme, se sufficientemente rallentato, non verrebbe notato da osservatori il cui arco di osservazione, nel tempo, è troppo breve. Perciò, io vi dico che ho visto mutamenti che voi non avreste mai notato.

People always expect the worst of the rich and powerful, Sire. It is said one can always tell an aristocrat: he reveals only those of his vices which will make him popular.

them. Paul slipped out his nose plugs, swung the mouth baffle aside. The odor of the place assailed him: unwashed bodies, distillate esthers of reclaimed wastes, everywhere the sour effluvia of humanity with, over it all, a turbulence of spice and spicelike harmonics.

We Fremen have a saying: 'God created Arrakis to train the faithful.' One cannot go against the word of God.

Indeed? Pardon me for not listening further but I am really on an urgent errand.

their faces masked by smiles.

Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders. —LAW AND GOVERNANCE THE SPACING GUILD MANUAL