970 Quotes by Frank Herbert

You can't build politics on love. People aren't concerned with love; it's too disordered. They prefer despotism. Too much freedom breeds chaos.

If you believe certain words, you believe their hidden arguments. When you believe something is right or wrong, true or false, you believe the assumptions in the words which express the arguments. Such assumptions are often full of holes, but remain most precious to the convinced.

Law is the ultimate science.

I have come to believe that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.

A creature who has spent his life creating one particular representation of his selfdom will die rather than become the antithesis of that representation

I don’t think it’s quite that simple. Some people never observe anything, Life just happens to them. They get by on little more than a kind of dumb persistence, and they resist with anger and resentment anything that might lift them out of that false serenity.

Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and predator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself — a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred.

The basic lesson of our relativistic universe is that things change. Any power must always meet a greater power.

You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.