Top 500 Frank Herbert Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.”

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

258. “Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. Something cannot emerge from nothing.”

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

260. “Words are such gross machinery, so primitive and ambiguous.”

— Frank Herbert

261. “God created Arrakis to train the faithful.”

— Frank Herbert

262. “Desperate people are the most dangerous.”

— Frank Herbert

263. “Law always chooses sides on the basis of enforcement power. Morality and legal niceties have little to do with it when the real question is: Who has the clout?”

— Frank Herbert

264. “Religion is the emulation of the adult by the child. Religion is the encystment of past beliefs: mythology, which is guesswork, the hidden assumptions of trust in the universe, those pronouncements which men have made in search of personal power, all of it mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always the ultimate unspoken commandment is ‘Thou shalt not question!”

— Frank Herbert

265. “The eye that looks ahead to the safe course is closed forever.”

— Frank Herbert

266. “Review, friends – troops long past review,” the Duke intoned. “All to fate a weight of pains and dollars. Their spirits wear our silver collars. Review, friends – troops long past review: Each a dot of time without pretense or guile. With them passes the lure of fortune. Review, friends – troops long past review. When our time ends on its rictus smile, we’ll pass the lure of fortune.”

— Frank Herbert

267. “A requirement of creativity is that it contributes to change. Creativity keeps the creator alive.”

— Frank Herbert

268. “There’s hope left in these dusty chords. There’s a song left in our rusty hearts. We are torn and frayed but love remains.”

— Frank Herbert

269. “Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma.”

— Frank Herbert

270. “There are many degrees of sight and many degrees of blindness. What senses do we lack that we cannot see another world all around us?”

— Frank Herbert

271. “There are problems in this universe for which there are no answers. Nothing. Nothing can be done.”

— Frank Herbert

272. “To use raw power is to make yourself infinitely vulnerable to greater powers.”

— Frank Herbert

273. “You must cultivate ecological literacy among the people.”

— Frank Herbert

274. “The wise man molds himself – the fool lives only to die.”

— Frank Herbert

275. “Silence is often the best thing to say.”

— Frank Herbert

276. “But it’s well known that repression makes a religion flourish.”

— Frank Herbert

277. “Providence and Manifest Destiny are synonyms often invoked to support arguments based on wishful thinking.”

— Frank Herbert

278. “The man without emotions is the one to fear.”

— Frank Herbert

279. “Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it’s a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.”

— Frank Herbert

280. “He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future. Things persisted in not being what they seemed.”

— Frank Herbert

281. “All men seek to be enlightened. Religion is but the most ancient and honorable way in which men have striven to make sense out of God’s universe. Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.”

— Frank Herbert

282. “Dune Messiah, Frank Herbert’s first sequel to Dune, was published in 1969. In that book, he flipped over what he called the “myth of the hero” and showed the dark side of Paul Atreides. Some readers didn’t understand it. Why would the author do that to his great hero? In interviews, Dad spent years afterward explaining why, and his reasons were sound. He believed that charismatic leaders could be dangerous because they could lead their followers off the edge of a cliff.”

— Frank Herbert

283. “In my estimation, more misery has been created by reformers than by any other force in human history.”

— Frank Herbert

284. “Sad? Nonsense! Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place.” He glanced at the charts on the table. “And Arrakis is just another place.”

— Frank Herbert

285. “The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.”

— Frank Herbert

286. “Paired opposites define your longings and those longings imprison you.”

— Frank Herbert

287. “Most men go through life unchallenged, except at the final moment.”

— Frank Herbert

288. “The proximity of a desirable thing tempts one to overindulgence. On that path lies danger.”

— Frank Herbert

289. “Axiom: the best place to conserve your water is in your body. It keeps your energy up. You’re stronger. Trust your stillsuit.” She.”

— Frank Herbert

290. “The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires.”

— Frank Herbert

291. “Membership in a conspiracy, as in an army, frees people from the sense of personal responsibility.”

— Frank Herbert

292. “Most discipline is hidden discipline, designed not to liberate but to limit. Do not ask Why? Be cautious with How? Why? leads inexorably to paradox. How? traps you in a universe of cause and effect. Both deny the infinite.”

— Frank Herbert

293. “It is said of Muad’Dib that once when he saw a weed trying to grow between two rocks, he moved one of the rocks. Later, when the weed was seen to be flourishing, he covered it with the remaining rock. “That was its fate,” he explained.”

— Frank Herbert

294. “Guilt starts as a feeling of failure.”

— Frank Herbert

295. “In politics, the tripod is he most unstable of all structures. It’s be bad enough without the complication of a feudal trade culture which turns its back on most science.”

— Frank Herbert

296. “Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your own life.”

— Frank Herbert

297. “How easy it was to mistake clear reasoning for correct reasoning!”

— Frank Herbert

298. “Power bases are very dangerous because they attract people who are truly insane, people who seek power only for the sake of power.”

— Frank Herbert

299. “The greatest and most important problems of life cannot be solved. They can only be outgrown.”

— Frank Herbert

300. “There has never been a truly selfless rebel, just hypocrites – conscious hypocrites or unconscious hypocrites, it’s all the same.”

— Frank Herbert