Delay is as dangerous as the wrong answer.

— Frank Herbert

Democracy is susceptible to being led astray by having scapegoats paraded in front of the electorate. Get the rich, the greedy, the criminals, the stupid leader and so on ad nauseam.

— Frank Herbert

Do actions agree with words? There's your measure of reliability. Never confine yourself to the words.

— Frank Herbert

Does a population have informed consent when that population is not taught the inner workings of its monetary system, and then is drawn, all unknowing, into economic adventures?

— Frank Herbert

Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem. It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced — in a word, insane.

— Frank Herbert

Don't sit with your back to any doors.

— Frank Herbert

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.

— Frank Herbert

Do you wrestle with dreams? Do you contend with shadows? Do you move in a kind of sleep? Time has slipped away. Your life is stolen. You tarried with trifles, Victim of your folly.

— Frank Herbert

Dune was a world of paradox now—a world under siege, yet the center of power. To come under siege, he decided, was the inevitable fate of power.

— Frank Herbert

Each of us comes into being knowing who he is and what he is supposed to do.' ... 'Small children know,' Let said. 'It's only after adults have confused them that children hide this knowledge even from themselves.

— Frank Herbert