Inspirational Quotes by Frank Herbert — Words of Wisdom for Daily Success

“The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: "I feed on your energy.”

“Religions create radicals and fanatics like you!”

“In 1054, the patriarch of Constantinople and the pope excommunicated each other.”

“Some say," Scytale said, "that people cling to Imperial leadership because space is infinite. They feel lonely without a unifying symbol. For a lonely people, the Emperor is a definite place. They can turn toward him and say: 'See, there He is. He makes us one.' Perhaps religion serves the same purpose, m'Lord.”

“But it's well known that repression makes a religion flourish.”

“The Fremen have a simple, practical religion,” he said.”

“Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.”

“Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, 'I am not the kind of person I want to be.' It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.”

“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”

“They are not mad. They're trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.”

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

“We have your language now," she said.”

“Small souls who seek power over others first destroy the faith those others might have in themselves.”

“What delicious abandon in the sleep of the child. Where do we lose it?”

“Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.”

“The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture - it begins in the dignity with which we treat the dead”

“Do you wrestle with dreams?”

“My father once told me that respect for truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. 'Something cannot emerge from nothing,' he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable 'the truth' can be.”

“Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.”

“I have said: "Blow out the lamp! Day is here!" And you keep saying: "Give me a lamp so I can find the day.”

“Beginnings are such delicate times.”

“Religion, too, is a weapon. What manner of weapon is religion when it becomes the government?”

“Education is no substitute for intelligence.”

“My Uncle Malky always said the Lord Leto never responded to prayer. He said the Lord Leto looked on prayer as attempted coercion, a form of violence against the chosen god, telling the immortal what to do: Give me a miracle, God, or I won't believe in you!”

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

“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.”

“To be a god can ultimately become boring and degrading. There'd be reason enough for the invention of free will! A god might wish to escape into sleep and be alive only in the unconscious projections of his dream-creatures.”

“The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it.”

“Whether a thought is spoken or not it is a real thing and it has power," Tuek said. "You might find the line between life and death among the Fremen to be too sharp and quick.”

“Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class - whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.”

“The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.”

“The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.”