Frank Herbert
He who controls the spice controls the universe.Collection: Spices
Justice? Who asks for justice? We make our own justice ... Let us not rail about justice as long as we have arms and the freedom to use them.Collection: Long
Irreverence is a most necessary ingredient of religion. Not to speak of its importance in philosophy. Irreverence is the only way left to us for testing our universe.Collection: Philosophy
The joy of living, its beauty, is all bound up in the fact that life can surprise you.Collection: Life
There has never been a truly selfless rebel, just hypocrites—conscious hypocrites or unconscious hypocrites, it’s all the same.Collection: Hypocrite
Good subjects must feel guilty. The guilt begins as a feeling of failure. The good autocrat provides many opportunities for failure in the populace.Collection: Opportunity
When we try to conceal our innermost drives, the entire being screams betrayal.Collection: Betrayal
Words are such gross machinery, so primitive and ambiguous.Collection: Machinery
When he wanted, he could radiate charm and sincerity, but I often wonder in these later days if anything about him was as it seemed. I think now he was a man fighting constantly to escape the bars of an invisible cage.Collection: Fighting
Whether a thought is spoken or not it is a real thing and has powers of reality.Collection: Real
The flesh surrenders itself. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not...yet, I occurred.Collection: Love Life
Life - all life - is in the service of life. Necessary nutrients are made available to life by life in greater and greater richness as the diversity of life increases. The entire landscape comes alive, filled with relationships and relationships within relationships.Collection: Diversity
We can say that Maud'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn.Collection: Inspirational
Control the coinage and the courts — let the rabble have the rest.Collection: Court
Proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you have always known.Collection: Teaching
Journalism is the entertainment business.Collection: Entertainment
Many have marked the speed with which Muad'Dib learned the necessities of Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit, of course, know the basis of this speed. For the others, we can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. 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.Collection: Believe
A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.Collection: Balance
Blood is thicker than water, but politics are thicker than blood.Collection: Blood
Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your own life.Collection: Missing
When your opponent fears you, then's the moment when you give the fear its own rein, give it the time to work on him. Let it become terror. The terrified man fights himself. Eventually, he attacks in desperation. That is the most dangerous moment, but the terrified man can be trusted usually to make a fatal mistake. You are being trained here to detect these mistakes and use them.Collection: Mistake
A ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel... he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men... a good ruler has to learn his world's language... it's different for every world... the language of the rocks and growing things... the language you don't hear just with your ears... the Mystery of Life... not a problem to solve, but a reality to experience... Understanding must move with the flow of the process.Collection: Coffee
What are you, child, that you need time to learn about yourself?Collection: Children
She looked at patches of blackness. Black is a blind remembering, she thought.Collection: Black
Justice required resort to law and that could be a fickle mistress, subject always to the whims and prejudices of those who administered the laws.Collection: Law
When I was writing Dune there was no room in my mind for concerns about the book's success or failure. I was concerned only with the writing. Six years of research had preceded the day I sat down to put the story together, and the interweaving of the many plot layers I had planned required a degree of concentration I had never before experienced.Collection: Book
The most terrifying things in the universe came from human minds.Collection: Mind
There's hope left in these dusty chords. There's a song left in our rusty hearts. We are torn and frayed but love remains.Collection: Song
Leto turned a hard stare at Kynes. And Kynes, returning the stare, found himself troubled by a fact he had observed here: This Duke was concerned more over the men than he was over the spice. He risked his own life, and that of his son to save the men. He passed off the loss of a spice crawler with a gesture. The threat to men's lives had him in a rage. A leader such as that would command fanatic loyalty. He would be difficult to defeat. Against his own will and all previous judgements, Kynes admitted to himself: I like this Duke.Collection: Loyalty
What does a mirror look at?Collection: Mirrors
Major flaw in government arise from a fear of making radical internal changes even though a need is clearly seen.Collection: Government
What you of the CHOAM directorate seem unable to understand is that you seldom find real loyalties in commerce. ... Men must want to do things of their own innermost drives. People, not commercial organizations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work. Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness - they cannot work and their civilization collapses.Collection: Loyalty
Here lies a toppled god. His fall was not a small one. We did but build his pedestal, A narrow and a tall one.Collection: Lying
We are questioning more than the philosophy behind our dependence upon limited and limiting systems. We question the power structures that have grown up around such systems.Collection: Philosophy
A killer with the manners of a rabbit - this is the most dangerous kind.Collection: Rabbits
The summer Night comes brooding down on Earth, As Love comes brooding down on human hearts, With bliss that hath no utterance save rich tears. She floats in fragrance down the smiling dark, Foldeth a kiss upon the lips of Life-- Curtaineth into rest the weary world-- And shuts us in with all our hid delights.Collection: Summer
If you rely only on your eyes, your other senses weaken.Collection: Eye
Grief is the price of victory.Collection: Grief
I hear the wind blowing across the desert and I see the moons of a winter night rising like great ships in the void. To them I make my vow: I will be resolute and make an art of government; I will balance my inherited past and become a perfect storehouse of my relic memories. And I will be known for kindliness more than for knowledge. My face will shine down the corridors of time for as long as humans exist.Collection: Art
That path leads ever down into stagnation.Collection: Path
Give me a lamp so I can find the day.Collection: Giving
Constitutions become the ultimate tyranny," Paul said. "They’re organized power on such a scale as to be overwhelming. The constitution is social power mobilized and it has no conscience. It can crush the highest and the lowest, removing all dignity and individuality. It has an unstable balance point and no limitations.Collection: Crush
We are generalists. You can't draw neat lines around planet-wide problems. Planetology is a cut-and-fit science.Collection: Cutting
Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.Collection: Men
Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know.Collection: Believe
Membership in a conspiracy, as in an army, frees people from the sense of personal responsibility.Collection: Responsibility
It is not the present which unfluences 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.Collection: Events
Words can carry any burden we wish. All that's required is agreement and a tradition upon which to build.Collection: Agreement