“His plan has good points and bad points...as any plan would at this stage. A plan depends as much upon execution as it does upon concept.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Piter spoke to Jessica. "I'd thought of binding you by a threat held over your son, but I begin to see that would not have worked. I let emotion cloud reason. Bad policy for a Mentat.”
―
Frank Herbert
“What was it St. Augustine said? "The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.”
―
Frank Herbert
“There’s an internally recognized beauty of motion and balance on any man-healthy planet,” Kynes said. “You see in this beauty a dynamic stabilizing effect essential to all life. Its aim is simple: to maintain and produce coordinated patterns of greater and greater diversity. Life improves the closed system’s capacity to sustain life. Life—all life—is in the service of life. Necessary nutrients are made available to life by life in greater and greater richness as the diversity of life increases. The entire landscape comes alive, filled with relationships and relationships within relationships.”
―
Frank Herbert
“My father rules an entire planet."
"He's losing it.”
―
Frank Herbert
“And he thought then about the Guild—the force that had specialized for so long that it had become a parasite, unable to exist independently of the life upon which it fed. They had never dared grasp the sword…and now they could not grasp it. They might have taken Arrakis when they realized the error of specializing on the melange awareness-spectrum narcotic for their navigators. They could have done this, lived their glorious day and died. Instead, they’d existed from moment to moment, hoping the seas in which they swam might produce a new host when the old one died.”
―
Frank Herbert
“There’s another thing, Jessica thought. Paul must be cautioned about their women. One of these desert women would not do as wife to a Duke. As concubine, yes, but not as wife.”
―
Frank Herbert
“People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.”
―
Frank Herbert
“A good ruler has to learn his world's language, and that's different for every world, the language you don't hear just with your ears.”
―
Frank Herbert
“There's coffee for those who want it,' the Duke said.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Umman Kudu: scissors-line of jaw muscles, chin like a boot toe - a man to be trusted because the captain's vices were known.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Most of the Houses have grown fat by taking few risks. One cannot truly blame them for this; one can only despise them.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert.”
―
Frank Herbert
“he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning “That path leads ever down into stagnation.”
―
Frank Herbert
