Top 500 Frank Herbert Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “When you think to take determination of your fate into your own hands, that is the moment you can be crushed. Be cautious.”

— Frank Herbert

202. “Divide and rule, subdivide and rule even more powerfully, fragment and rule absolutely.” “That’s.”

— Frank Herbert

203. “Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere.”

— Frank Herbert

204. “There exists no separation between gods and men; one blends softly casual into the other.”

— Frank Herbert

205. “What is important for a leader is that which makes him a leader. It is the needs of his people.”

— Frank Herbert

206. “Think on it, Chani: the princess will have the name, yet she’ll live as less than a concubine – never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she’s bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine – history will call us wives.”

— Frank Herbert

207. “Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the future as well.”

— Frank Herbert

208. “The day hums sweetly when you have enough bees working for you.”

— Frank Herbert

209. “Prisons are needed only to provide the illusion that courts and police are effective. They’re a kind of job insurance.”

— Frank Herbert

210. “To come under siege was the inevitable fate of power.”

— Frank Herbert

211. “All proofs inevitably lead to propositions which have no proof! All things are known because we want to believe in them.”

— Frank Herbert

212. “There are some things no one can bear. I meddled in all the possible futures I could create until, finally, they created me.”

— Frank Herbert

213. “Often I must Speak otherwise than I Think. This is Called Diplomacy.”

— Frank Herbert

214. “One must cast off old agonies as a snake casts off its skin – only to grow a new set and accept all of their limitations.”

— Frank Herbert

215. “If you focus your awareness only upon your own rightness, then you invite the forces of opposition to overwhelm you.”

— Frank Herbert

216. “When he wanted, he could radiate charm and sincerity, but I often wonder in these later days if anything about him was as it seemed. I think now he was a man fighting constantly to escape the bars of an invisible cage.”

— Frank Herbert

217. “A creature who has spent his life creating one particular representation of his selfdom will die rather than become the antithesis of that representation.”

— Frank Herbert

218. “Learning a language represents training in the delusions of that language.”

— Frank Herbert

219. “Just as individuals are born, mature, breed, and die, so do societies and civilizations and governments.”

— Frank Herbert

220. “If we deny emotion, we lose all touch with our internal universe.”

— Frank Herbert

221. “When we try to conceal our innermost drives, the entire being screams betrayal.”

— Frank Herbert

222. “Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.”

— Frank Herbert

223. “There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man – with human flesh.”

— Frank Herbert

224. “The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed.”

— Frank Herbert

225. “The surest way to keep a secret is to make someone think they already know the answer.”

— Frank Herbert

226. “Answers are a perilous grip on the universe. They can appear sensible yet explain nothing.”

— Frank Herbert

227. “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

228. “You see, gentlemen, they have something to die for. They’ve discovered they’re a people. They’re awakening.”

— Frank Herbert

229. “The oppressed always learned from and copied the oppressor. When the tables were turned, the stage was set for another round of revenge and violence – roles reversed. And reversed and reversed ad nauseam.”

— Frank Herbert

230. “Machine makers always run the risk of becoming totally machine.”

— Frank Herbert

231. “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

232. “You don’t see much of any path unless you are Janus, looking simultaneously backward and forward.”

— Frank Herbert

233. “If you ask “Should we be in space?” you ask a nonsense question. We are in space. We will be in space.”

— Frank Herbert

234. “People don’t vote. Instinct tells them it’s useless.”

— Frank Herbert

235. “There is only one true wealth in all the universe – living time.”

— Frank Herbert

236. “The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him.”

— Frank Herbert

237. “Humans live best when each has his place, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things. Destroy the place and destroy the person.”

— Frank Herbert

238. “The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in.”

— Frank Herbert

239. “The universe does not work by our rules.”

— Frank Herbert

240. “What’s a gom jabbar?”

— Frank Herbert

241. “Proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you have always known.”

— Frank Herbert

242. “Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.”

— Frank Herbert

243. “Money to a writer is time to write.”

— Frank Herbert

244. “We possess only this moment in which to dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence which we share and create.”

— Frank Herbert

245. “Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me most. I distrust the extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It.”

— Frank Herbert

246. “I hold at your neck the gom jabbar,” she said. “The gom jabbar, the high-handed enemy. It’s a needle with a drop of poison on its tip. Ah-ah! Don’t pull away or you’ll feel that poison.”

— Frank Herbert

247. “The scarce water of Dune is an exact analog of oil scarcity. CHOAM is OPEC.”

— Frank Herbert

248. “To know the future absolutely it to be trapped into that future absolutely. It collapses time. Present becomes future.”

— Frank Herbert

249. “What is the son but an extension of the father?”

— Frank Herbert

250. “The unclouded eye was better, no matter what it saw.”

— Frank Herbert