Frank Herbert Quotes

Schools were started to train human talents... The Guild... emphasizes almost pure mathematics. Bene Gesserit performs... politics. The original Bene Gesserit school was directed by those who saw the need of a thread of continuity in human affairs. They saw there count be no such continuity without separating human stock from animal stock - for breeding purposes.

One moment of incompetence can be fatal.

Chance is the nature of our universe. […] madness represents a chaotic reservoir of surprises. Some surprises can be valuable.

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

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.

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

Do you know what guerrillas often say? They claim that their rebellions are invulnerable to economic warfare because they have no economy, that they are parasitic on those they would overthrow. The fools merely fail to access the coin in which they must inevitably pay. The pattern is inexorable in its degenerative failures. You see it repeated in the systems of slavery, of welfare states, of caste-ridden religions, of socializing bureaucracies -- in any system in which creates and maintains dependencies. Too long a parasite and you cannot exist without a host.

What the eyes had seen could not be erased.