Quotes from Frank Herbert

To endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe.

You aren't thinking or really existing unless you're willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgement of your existence.

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.

A stone is heavy and the sand is weighty; but a fool's wrath is heavier than them both.

You do not beg the sun for mercy. -Maud'dib's Travail from The Stilgar Commentary

One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim.

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.

Prisons are needed only to provide the illusion that courts and police are effective. They're a kind of job insurance.

There's a Bene Gesserit saying," she said. "You have sayings for everything!" he protested. "You'll like this one," she said. "It goes: 'Do not count a human dead until you've seen his body. And even then you can make a mistake.

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.

Technology tends toward avoidance of risks by investors. Uncertainty is ruled out if possible. 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.

There has never been a truly selfless rebel, just hypocrites—conscious hypocrites or unconscious hypocrites, it's all the same.