Quotes by Frank Herbert

About Frank Herbert:

Frank Patrick Herbert, Jr. was an American science fiction writer best known for the novel Dune and its five sequels. Though he became famous for science fiction, he was also a newspaper journalist, photographer, short story writer, book reviewer, ecological consultant and lecturer.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Every judgment teeters on the brink of error,” Leto explained. “To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

Frank Herbert

I am not the river I am the net.

Frank Herbert

The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.

Frank Herbert

There is a fundamental tension between science and freedom - no matter how science is viewed by its practitioners nor how freedom is sensed by those who believe they have it.

Frank Herbert

In their passion for sameness, the tyrants made themselves more and more powerful. All others grew correspondingly weaker and weaker. New bureaus and directorates, odd ministries, leaped into existence for the most improbable purposes. These became t...

Frank Herbert

We have a disturbed relationship with our past which religion cannot explain. We are primitive in unexplainable ways, our lives woven of the familiar and the strange, the reasonable and the insane.

Frank Herbert

Fannie Mae had aroused his anger, then reduced his anger to verbal breast-beating, and finally to silent hurt. Still, the love remained. Why?

Frank Herbert

We accept too damned many things on the explanations of people who could have good reasons for lying.

Frank Herbert

It was a BuSab axiom that all power blocs tended toward aristocratic forms, that the descendants of decision makers dominated the power niches.

Frank Herbert

The flesh surrenders itself. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What ca...

Frank Herbert

Reason is the first victim of strong emotion.

Frank Herbert

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...

Frank Herbert

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

Frank Herbert

Government cannot be religious and self-assertive at the same time. Religious experience needs a spontaneity which laws inevitably suppress. And you cannot govern without laws. Your laws eventually must replace morality, replace conscience, replace e...

Frank Herbert

Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual.

Frank Herbert

And loyalty is a valued commodity. It can be sold . . . not bought, but sold.

Frank Herbert

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 s...

Frank Herbert

Constitutions become the ultimate tyranny," Paul said. "They’re organized power on such a scale as to be overwhelming. The constitution is social power mobilized and it has no conscience. It can crush the highest and the lowest, removing all dignit...

Frank Herbert

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

Frank Herbert

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 ma...

Frank Herbert

I don't speak, I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own.

Frank Herbert

Author Bio

  • NameFrank Herbert
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • AliasesFranklin Patrick Herbert, Jr.
  • BornOctober 8, 1920
  • DiedFebruary 11, 1986
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Photographer
  • WorksDune
  • AwardsNebula Award