Top 500 Frank Herbert Quotes (2023 Update)
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51. “Something cannot emerge from nothing.”

— 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. “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

54. “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

55. “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

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

58. “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

59. “Education is no substitute for intelligence.”

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

61. “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

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

— Frank Herbert

63. “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

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

68. “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

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

71. “Law is the ultimate science.”

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

75. “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

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

— Frank Herbert

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

92. “If wishes were fishes, we’d all cast nets.”

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

94. “Any man who retreats into a cave which has only one opening deserves to die.”

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

96. “My father once told me that respect for truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. ‘Something cannot emerge from nothing,’ he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable ‘the truth’ can be.”

— Frank Herbert

97. “I’m going to rub your faces in things you try to avoid. I don’t find it strange that all you want to believe is only that which comforts you. How else do humans invent the traps which betray us into mediocrity? How else do we define cowardice?”

— Frank Herbert

98. “The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth.”

— Frank Herbert

99. “Revenge is for children and the emotionally retarded.”

— Frank Herbert

100. “Beware! The mind of the believer stagnates. It fails to grow outward into an unlimited, infinite universe.”

— Frank Herbert