Top 500 Frank Herbert Quotes (2023 Update)
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451. “Politics: the art of appearing candid and completely open while concealing as much as possible.”

— Frank Herbert

452. “Always prepare secondary ways of dealing with problems.”

— Frank Herbert

453. “A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people.”

— Frank Herbert

454. “Moral decisions are always easy to recognize,” Odrade said. “They are where you abandon self-interest.”

— Frank Herbert

455. “Your own emperor bestowed Arrakis on House Atreides. I am House Atreides.” The.”

— Frank Herbert

456. “I’ve heard enough sad histories of gods and messiahs. Why should I need special powers to forecast ruins of my own like all those others?”

— Frank Herbert

457. “Why is it that foolishness repeats itself with such monotonous precision?”

— Frank Herbert

458. “As with all priests, you learned early to call the truth heresy.”

— Frank Herbert

459. “His voice was low, charged with unspeakable adjectives.”

— Frank Herbert

460. “Is your religion real when it costs you nothing and carries no risk? Is your religion real when you fatten upon it? Is your religion real when you commit atrocities in its name?”

— Frank Herbert

461. “Prophets have a way of dying by violence.”

— Frank Herbert

462. “Educational bureaucracies dull a child’s questing sensitivity.” Odrade explaining. “The young must be damped down. Never let them know how good they can be. That brings change. Spend lots of committee time talking about how to deal with exceptional students. Don’t spend any time dealing with how the conventional teacher feels threatened by emerging talents and squelches them because of a deep-seated desire to feel superior and safe in a safe environment.”

— Frank Herbert

463. “Life is not an option, it is a gift. Death is the option.”

— Frank Herbert

464. “One who rules assumes irrevocable responsibility for the ruled. You are a husbandman. This demands, at times, a selfless act of love which may only be amusing to those you rule.”

— Frank Herbert

465. “Knowing was a barrier which prevented learning.”

— Frank Herbert

466. “Hard tasks need hard ways.”

— Frank Herbert

467. “You never talk of likelihoods on Arrakis. You speak only of possibilities.”

— Frank Herbert

468. “Leaders made mistakes. And those mistakes, amplified by the numbers who followed without questioning, moved inevitably toward great disasters.”

— Frank Herbert

469. “The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.”

— Frank Herbert

470. “I live in an apocalyptic dream. My steps fit into it so precisely that I fear most of all I will grow bored reliving the thing so exactly.”

— Frank Herbert

471. “Stilgar put a hand on Idaho’s shoulder. “All men are interlopers, old friend.”

— Frank Herbert

472. “This world has emptied me of all but the oldest purpose: tomorrow’s life. I live now for my young Duke and the daughter yet to be. She.”

— Frank Herbert

473. “The most perfect barrier to learning a thing is the belief that is it already known.”

— Frank Herbert

474. “Each man is a little war.”

— Frank Herbert

475. “Then she said a good ruler has to learn his world’s language, that it’s different for every world. And I thought she meant they didn’t speak Galach on Arrakis, but she said that wasn’t it at all. She said she meant the language of the rocks and growing things, the language you don’t hear just with your ears.”

— Frank Herbert

476. “To be sighted in the land of the blind carries its own perils.”

— Frank Herbert

477. “Thinking you know something is a sure way to blind yourself.”

— Frank Herbert

478. “Words can carry any burden we wish. All that’s required is agreement and a tradition upon which to build.”

— Frank Herbert

479. “She looked at patches of blackness. Black is a blind remembering, she thought.”

— Frank Herbert

480. “Try to hold on to youth and it mocks you while it sprints away.”

— Frank Herbert

481. “Give me a lamp so I can find the day.”

— Frank Herbert

482. “Don’t sit with your back to any doors.”

— Frank Herbert

483. “Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know.”

— Frank Herbert

484. “In politics, the tripod is the most unstable of all structures.”

— Frank Herbert

485. “I’m the well-trained fruit tree. Full of well-trained feelings and abilities and all of them grafted onto me.”

— Frank Herbert

486. “A single obscure decision of prophecy, perhaps the choice of one word over another, could change the entire aspect of the future. He tells us “The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.”

— Frank Herbert

487. “Is God troubled?” And her companion replied: “The sins of this universe would trouble anyone.”

— Frank Herbert

488. “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

489. “Your habits always come hunting after you. The self you construct will haunt you. A ghost wandering around in search of your body, eager to possess you. We are addicted to the self we construct.”

— Frank Herbert

490. “Piter spoke to Jessica. “I’d thought of binding you by a threat held over your son, but I begin to see that would not have worked. I let emotion cloud reason. Bad policy for a Mentat.” -Piter De Vries.”

— Frank Herbert

491. “I see the day coming when ceremony must take the place of faith and symbolism replaces morality.”

— Frank Herbert

492. “To die before coming to the end of willpower, was that not an aristocrat’s choice? He.”

— Frank Herbert

493. “Is evolution just another name for God?”

— Frank Herbert

494. “What are you, child, that you need time to learn about yourself?”

— Frank Herbert

495. “To be a god can ultimately become boring and degrading. There’d be reason enough for the invention of free will! A god might wish to escape into sleep and be alive only in the unconscious projections of his dream-creatures.”

— Frank Herbert

496. “As you well know, the secret of community lies in suppression of the incompatible.”

— Frank Herbert

497. “We never get far from wealth and all of its masks when we deal with power.”

— Frank Herbert

498. “One doesn’t need telepathy to read your intentions.”

— Frank Herbert

499. “One moment of incompetence can be fatal.”

— Frank Herbert

500. “We are questioning more than the philosophy behind our dependence upon limited and limiting systems. We question the power structures that have grown up around such systems.”

— Frank Herbert