Quotes by Frank Herbert

Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.
– Frank Herbert
Enemies make you stronger, allies make you weaker.
– Frank Herbert
He who can destroy a thing, can control a thing.
– Frank Herbert
How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.
– Frank Herbert
If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.
– Frank Herbert
It is a wise man that does know the contented man is never poor, whilst the discontented man is never rich.
– Frank Herbert
It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.
– Frank Herbert
Kindness is the beginning of cruelty.
– Frank Herbert
Religion often partakes of the myth of progress that shields us from the terrors of an uncertain future.
– Frank Herbert
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.
– Frank Herbert
Something cannot emerge from nothing.
– Frank Herbert
The difference between sentiment and being sentimental is the following: Sentiment is when a driver swerves out of the way to avoid hitting a rabbit on the road. Being sentimental is when the same driver, when swerving away from the rabbit, hits a pedestrian.
– Frank Herbert
The proximity of a desirable thing tempts one to overindulgence. On that path lies danger.
– Frank Herbert
The stakes in conflict do not change. Battle determines who will control the wealth or its equivalent.
– Frank Herbert
There is no escape - we pay for the violence of our ancestors.
– Frank Herbert
To attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood. It is the attempt to see the Light without knowing the Darkness. It cannot be.
– Frank Herbert
To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.
– Frank Herbert
Wealth is a tool of freedom, but the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.
– Frank Herbert
What do you despise? By this are you truly known.
– Frank Herbert
When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual.
– Frank Herbert
Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. ...The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.
– Frank Herbert
A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.
– Frank Herbert
Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.
– Frank Herbert
The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.
– Frank Herbert
Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.
– Frank Herbert
One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could be the general and widespread understanding of how severely limited logic really is.
– Frank Herbert
It is not that power corrupts but that power is a magnet to the corruptible.
– Frank Herbert