Explore Quotes by Frank Herbert

The best contribution one can make to humanity is to improve oneself.

Humans are almost always lonely.

Ecology is often confused with environmentalism, while in fact, environmentalism often leaves out the fact that people, too, can be a legitimate part of an ecosystem.

When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual.

The proximity of a desirable thing tempts one to overindulgence. On that path lies danger.

Question: Who governs the governors? Answer: Entropy

If I'd been born in my grandfather's time, I'd have made my grandfather's mistakes. Theres no doubt of it. I just don't want to make my grandfather's mistakes today.

To come under siege was the inevitable fate of power.

Religions often partake of the myth of progress that shields us from the terrors of an uncertain future.

Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.

There is not secret to balance. You just have to feel the waves.

We never completely escape the teachers of our childhood nor any of the patterns that formed us.

If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order.

When politics and religion are intermingled, a people is suffused with a sense of invulnerability, and gathering speed in their forward charge, they fail to see the cliff ahead of them

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

The real universe is always one step beyond logic.

Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect all who seek it ... We should grant power over our affairs only to those who are reluctant to hold it and then only under conditions that increase that reluctance.

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.

Remember: Bureaucracy elevates conformity ... Make that elevates 'fatal stupidity' to the status of religion.

A popular man arouses the jealousy of the powerful.

A leader is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals and a people reverts to a mob.