Quotes from Frank Herbert

The censure of your peers? But what if your peers balked at no obscenity? You could do anything.

Paul felt that he waited for some private signal from his sister. It could be any action or word, something of wizardry and mystical processes, an outward streaming that would fit him like an arrow into a cosmic bow. This instant lay like quivering mercury in his awareness.

We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death.

It is far better to win a battle through skilled leadership and wise decisions than violence and bloodshed. It may not seem as glorious to the uninitiated, but in the end it results in fewer wounds--of any kind.

Bis jetzt haben die Menschen, wenn sie die Oberfläche ihrer Planeten veränderten, nichts als Krankheiten zugefügt. Glücklicherweise tendiert die Natur dazu, den ihr zugefügten Schaden zu absorbieren oder sie dem eigenen System geschickt anzupassen.

a lesson from past over-machined societies which you appear not to have learned. The devices themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines.

My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.

These are illusions of popular history which a successful religion must promote: Evil men never prosper; only the brave deserve the fair; honesty is the best policy; actions speak louder than words; virtue always triumphs; a good deed is its own reward; any bad human can be reformed; religious talismans protect one from demon possession; only females understand the ancient mysteries; the rich are doomed to unhappiness . . . —FROM THE INSTRUCTION MANUAL:

Big breasts in a woman and hard loins in a man (that tightly muscular look to the buttocks)—these were naturally important in sexual matchings. But without the eyes, the rest of it could go for nothing. Eyes were essential. You could drown in the right kind of eyes, he had learned, sink right into them and be unaware of what was being done to you until penis was firmly clasped in vagina. He

I know the trap of prescience. My father's life tells me what I need to know about it. No, grandmother: to know the future absolutely is to be trapped into that future absolutely. It collapses time. Present becomes future. I require more freedom than that.

When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement becomes headlong—faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late.

May thy knife chip and shatter.