Quotes from Frank Herbert

trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.

When a creature has developed into one thing, he will choose death rather than change into his opposite.

polish comes from the cities, wisdom from the desert.

You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.

This whole thing is explosive," Scytale said in a calmer voice. "It's ready to shatter. When it goes, it will send bits of itself out through the centuries. Don't you see this?

Black is a blind remembering

Technology, in common with many other activities, tends toward avoidance of risks by investors. Uncertainty is ruled out if possible. Capital investment follows this rule, since people generally prefer the predictable. Few recognize how destructive this can be, how it imposes severe limits on variability and thus makes whole populations fatally vulnerable to the shocking ways our universe can throw the dice.

Insanity is something like drowning,' said Sparrow. 'You go under; you flounder without direction;

One of the hardest things for a tyrant to find is people who actually make decisions.

Justice? Who asks for justice. We make our own justice. We make it here on Arrakis—win or die. Let us not rail about justice as long as we have arms and the freedom to use them.

I tell you, Prue, consciousness has to be something that flows against the current of time. Time in which it's embedded.

Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It's true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who form such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies.

The creature all men on Arrakis fear, you treat it like a riding animal.

So you're not a child," Jessica said. "I'm millions of years old. That requires adjustments which humans have never before been called upon to make.

Law—our highest ideal and our basest nature. Don't look too closely at the law.

As each day passes, you become increasingly unreal, more alien and remote from what I find myself to be on that new day. I am the only reality and, as you differ from me, you lose reality. The more curious I become, the less curious are those who worship me. Religion suppresses curiosity. What I do subtracts from the worshipper. Thus it is that eventually I will do nothing, giving it all back to frightened people who will find themselves on that day alone and forced to act for themselves.

Our supremacy on Caladan," the Duke said, "depended on sea and air power. Here, we must develop something I choose to call desert power. This

From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.

Paul raised his voice: Observe her, comrades! This is a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother, patient in a patient cause. She could wait with her sisters -- ninety generations for the proper combination of genes and environment to produce the one person their schemes required. Observe her! She knows now that the ninety generations have produced that person. Here I stand . . . but . . . I . . . will . . . never . . . do . . . her . . . bidding!

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

When you stumble," he said, "you may regain your balance by jumping beyond the thing that tripped you.

May this place give you as much pleasure as it has given me. Please permit the room to convey a lesson we learned from the same teachers: the proximity of a desirable thing tempts one to overindulgence. On that path lies danger.

Hayat?n s?rr?n?n çözülecek bir problem deÄŸil, tecrübe edilecek bir gerçeklik olduÄŸunu söyledi. Ben de Mentatl???n Ä°lk Yasas?'n? söyledim: 'Bir süreç onu durdurarak anla??lamaz. Ä°drak sürecin ak???yla birlikte gerçekleÅŸmeli, ona kat?lmal? ve onunla birlikte akmal?d?r.

Necessary rules and laws keep you from adapting. Inevitably, everything comes crashing down. It's like bankers thinking they buy the future. 'Power in my time! To hell with my descendants!'" "What are descendants doing for me?