Top 500 Frank Herbert Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “You should never be in the company of anyone with whom you would not want to die.”

— Frank Herbert

202. “The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it.”

— Frank Herbert

203. “There’s no mystery about a human life. It’s not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”

— Frank Herbert

204. “Peace demands solutions, but we never reach living solutions; we only work toward them. A fixed solution is, by definition, a dead solution. The trouble with peace is that it tends to punish mistakes instead of rewarding brilliance. –.”

— Frank Herbert

205. “What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking-there’s the real danger.”

— Frank Herbert

206. “Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife – chopping off what’s incomplete and saying: “Now, it’s complete because it’s ended here.”

— Frank Herbert

207. “The best prophets lead you up to the curtain and let you peer through for yourself.”

— Frank Herbert

208. “Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed.”

— Frank Herbert

209. “You do not take from this universe. It grants you what it will.”

— Frank Herbert

210. “The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we do to each other.”

— Frank Herbert

211. “I wrote the Dune series because I had this idea that charismatic leaders ought to come with a warning label on their forehead: “May be dangerous to your health.” One of the most dangerous presidents we had in this century was John Kennedy because people said “Yes Sir Mr. Charismatic Leader what do we do next?” and we wound up in Vietnam. And I think probably the most valuable president of this century was Richard Nixon. Because he taught us to distrust government and he did it by example.”

— Frank Herbert

212. “How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.”

— Frank Herbert

213. “Major flaw in government arise from a fear of making radical internal changes even though a need is clearly seen.”

— Frank Herbert

214. “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

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

— Frank Herbert

216. “It’s easier to be terrified by an enemy you admire.”

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

218. “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

219. “You shall be known among us as Usul, the base of the pillar. This is your secret name, your troop name. We of Sietch.”

— Frank Herbert

220. “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

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

233. “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

234. “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

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

— Frank Herbert

236. “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

237. “Mood?” Halleck’s voice betrayed his outrage even through the shield’s filtering. “What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises – no matter the mood! Mood’s a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It’s not for fighting.”

— Frank Herbert

238. “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

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

241. “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

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

244. “What’s a gom jabbar?”

— Frank Herbert

245. “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

246. “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

247. “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

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert