Top 500 Frank Herbert Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “The unclouded eye was better, no matter what it saw.”

— Frank Herbert

252. “The problem with leadership is that leaders are human beings. And when they make mistakes, their mistakes are amplified by the numbers who follow without question.”

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

256. “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

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

260. “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

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

263. “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

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

270. “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

271. “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

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

— Frank Herbert

273. “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

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

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

276. “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

277. “Humans are almost always lonely.”

— Frank Herbert

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “We tend to become like the worst in those we oppose.”

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

283. “Those who would repeat the past must control the teaching of history.”

— Frank Herbert

284. “I don’t worry about inspiration, or anything like that. It’s a matter of just sitting down and working.”

— Frank Herbert

285. “There are limits to power, as those who put their hopes in a constitution always discover.”

— Frank Herbert

286. “It is said that there is a principle of conflict which originated with the single cell and has never deteriorated.”

— Frank Herbert

287. “At root, I am happy with myself. I do not mind being alone.”

— Frank Herbert

288. “Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit.”

— Frank Herbert

289. “Time is a measure of space, just as a range-finder is a measure of space, but measuring locks us into the place we measure.”

— Frank Herbert

290. “If I’d been born in my grandfather’s time, I’d have made my grandfather’s mistakes. Theres no doubt of it. I just don’t want to make my grandfather’s mistakes today.”

— Frank Herbert

291. “Argument closes off the doors of the senses. It always masks violence. Continued too long, argument always leads to violence.”

— Frank Herbert

292. “Governments do not know what they cannot do until after they cease to be governments. Each government carries the seeds of its own destruction.”

— Frank Herbert

293. “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

294. “The thing about computers – it’s like training a dog. You have to be smarter than the dog. If you make a computer smarter than you are, that has to be accident, synergy, or divine intervention.”

— Frank Herbert

295. “She felt that her body had walked into this place with her soul creeping behind.”

— Frank Herbert

296. “Every civilization depends on the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness-they cannot work and their civilization collapses.”

— Frank Herbert

297. “Anything less than abject submission has to have some attack in it.”

— Frank Herbert

298. “Men always fear things which move by themselves.”

— Frank Herbert

299. “A human being can stand any amount of pain.”

— Frank Herbert

300. “Hittite law emphasized restitution rather than revenge. Humankind lost a certain useful practicality when it chose the other Semitic response – never to forgive and never to forget.”

— Frank Herbert