Frank Herbert

Politics: the art of appearing candid and completely open while concealing as much as possible.

A man is a fool not to put everything he has, at any given moment, into what he is creating.

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

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

Question: Who governs the governors? Answer: Entropy

To come under siege was the inevitable fate of power.

A popular man arouses the jealousy of the powerful.

War is behavior with roots in the single cell of the primeval seas. Eat whatever you touch or it will eat you.

Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces.

The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it.

Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he or she is in. That person must reflect what is projected upon him or her.

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

Those who would repeat the past must control the teaching of history.

Time can also be a place.... Everything depends on where you are standing, on where you look or what you hear. The measure of it is found in consciousness itself.

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

Caution is the path to mediocrity. Gliding, passionless mediocrity is all that most people think they can achieve.

This wise man observed that wealth is a tool of freedom. But the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.

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

When I need to identify rebels, I look for men with principles

And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning 'That path leads ever down into stagnation.

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.