Quotes from Frank Herbert

When God hath ordained a creature to die in a particular place, He causeth that creature's wants to direct him to that place.

Do as she says, you wormfaced, crawling, sand-brained piece of lizard turd!

At the age of fifteen, he had already learned silence.

I realize that humans cannot bear very much reality. Most lives are a flight from selfhood. Most prefer the truths of the stable. You stick your heads into the stanchions and munch contentedly until you die. Others use you for their purposes. Not once do you live outside the stable to lift your head and be your own creature. Muad'Dib came to tell you about that. Without understanding his message, you cannot revere him!

Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent mutual regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it.

Sometimes I wonder about Piter, the Baron said. I cause pain out of necessity, but he...I swear he takes a positive delight in it. -Baron Vladimir

A world is supported by four things... the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing...without a ruler who knows the art of ruling.

Remember that there exists a certain malevolence about the formation of any social order. It is the struggle for existence by an artificial entity. Despotism and slavery hover at the edges. Many injuries occur and, thus, the need for laws. The law develops its own power structure, creating more wounds and new injustices. Such trauma can be healed by cooperation, not by confrontation. The summons to cooperate identifies the healer.

I must rule with eye and claw — as the hawk among lesser birds. - Duke Leto Atreides

This myth he'd made out of intricate movements and imagination, out of moonlight and love, out of prayers older than Adam, and gray cliffs and crimson shadows, laments and rivers of martyrs - what had it come to at last? When the waves receded, the shores of Time would spread out there clean, empty, shining with infinite grains of memory and little else.

In politics, the tripod is the most unstable of all structures.

Better a dry morsel and quietness therewith than a house full of sacrifice and strife.