Top 500 Frank Herbert Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear’s path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

— Frank Herbert

52. “Show me a completely smooth operation and I’ll show you someone who’s covering mistakes. Real boats rock.”

— Frank Herbert

53. “Something cannot emerge from nothing.”

— Frank Herbert

54. “To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.”

— Frank Herbert

55. “Highly organized research is guaranteed to produce nothing new.”

— Frank Herbert

56. “Here lies a toppled god. His fall was not a small one. We did but build his pedestal, A narrow and a tall one.”

— Frank Herbert

57. “Justice belongs to those who claim it, but let the claimant beware lest he create new injustice by his claim and thus set the bloody pendulum of revenge into its inexorable motion.”

— Frank Herbert

58. “Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test it’s a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.”

— Frank Herbert

59. “Education is no substitute for intelligence.”

— Frank Herbert

60. “It is not the present which unfluences the future, thou fool, but the future which forms the present. You have it all backward. Since the future is set, an unfolding of events which will assure that future is fixed and inevitable.”

— Frank Herbert

61. “The real universe is always one step beyond logic.”

— Frank Herbert

62. “You don’t write for success. That takes part of your attention away from the writing. If you’re really doing it, that’s all you’re doing: writing.”

— Frank Herbert

63. “Face your fears or they will climb over your back.”

— Frank Herbert

64. “Reason is the first victim of strong emotion.”

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

66. “If you rely only on your eyes, your other senses weaken.”

— Frank Herbert

67. “The most persistent principles in the universe are accident and error.”

— Frank Herbert

68. “We faced it and did not resist. The storm passed through us and around us. It’s gone, but we remain.”

— Frank Herbert

69. “A storm is coming; our storm. Emperor – we come for you!”

— Frank Herbert

70. “You aren’t thinking or really existing unless you’re willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgement of your existence.”

— Frank Herbert

71. “When you think you know something: that is a most perfect barrier against learning.”

— Frank Herbert

72. “Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces.”

— Frank Herbert

73. “Law is the ultimate science.”

— Frank Herbert

74. “Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, absolute power attracts the corruptible.”

— Frank Herbert

75. “Madness in method, that’s genius.”

— Frank Herbert

76. “You can’t build politics on love. People aren’t concerned with love; it’s too disordered. They prefer despotism. Too much freedom breeds chaos.”

— Frank Herbert

77. “Then came the Butlerian Jihad – two generations of chaos. The god of machine-logic was overthrown among the masses and a new concept was raised: “Man may not be replaced.” Those.”

— Frank Herbert

78. “The undeserving maintain power by promoting hysteria.”

— Frank Herbert

79. “Nature does not make mistakes. Right and wrong are human categories.”

— Frank Herbert

80. “Knowing where the trap is – that’s the first step in evading it.”

— Frank Herbert

81. “Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.”

— Frank Herbert

82. “Peace for any prolonged period of time is impossible. Humans have a natural thirst for chaos and war is the most readily available form of chaos.”

— Frank Herbert

83. “Sympathy for the enemy – a weakness of police and armies alike. Most perilous are the unconscious sympathies directing you to preserve your enemy intact because the enemy is your justification for existence.”

— Frank Herbert

84. “You’ve heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There’s an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.”

— Frank Herbert

85. “To know a thing well, know it’s limits; Only when pushed beyond it’s tolerance will it’s true nature be seen. -The Amtal Rule.”

— Frank Herbert

86. “What you cannot control, you must accept.”

— Frank Herbert

87. “Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It’s shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad’Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.”

— Frank Herbert

88. “Religions often partake of the myth of progress that shields us from the terrors of an uncertain future.”

— Frank Herbert

89. “The most terrifying things in the universe came from human minds.”

— Frank Herbert

90. “Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.”

— Frank Herbert

91. “It is not that power corrupts but that power is a magnet to the corruptible.”

— Frank Herbert

92. “Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount.”

— Frank Herbert

93. “If you want immortality, then deny form. Whatever has form has mortality. Beyond form is the formless, the immortal.”

— Frank Herbert

94. “Radicals are only to be feared when you try to suppress them. You must demonstrate that you will use the best of what they offer.”

— Frank Herbert

95. “Order generally was a product of human activity. Chaos existed as a raw material from which to create order.”

— Frank Herbert

96. “To determine if you’re human. Be silent.”

— Frank Herbert

97. “The Fremen have a saying they credit to Shai-hulud, Old Father Eternity,’ he said. ‘They say: “Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.”

— Frank Herbert

98. “I never could bring myself to trust a traitor,” the Baron said. “Not even a traitor I created.”

— Frank Herbert

99. “Beginnings are such delicate times.”

— Frank Herbert

100. “Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert.”

— Frank Herbert