Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive. —Pardot”
―
Frank Herbert
“They’d never known anything but victory which, Paul realized, could be a weakness in itself. He put that thought aside for later consideration in his own training program.”
―
Frank Herbert
“The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture—it begins in the dignity with which we treat our dead.”
―
Frank Herbert
“There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times to develop psychic muscles.
―
Frank Herbert
“Your own emperor bestowed Arrakis on House Atreides. I am House Atreides.” The”
―
Frank Herbert
“When a Truthsayer's gifted by the drug, she can look many places in her memory - in her body's memory. We look down so many avenues of the past... but only feminine avenues... Yet there's a place no Truthsayer can see. We are repelled by it, terrorized. It is said a man will come one day and find in the gift of the drug his inward eye. He will look where we cannot - into both feminine and masculine pasts... Many men have tried the drug... so many, but none has succeeded."
"They tried and failed, all of them?"
"They tried and died.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Men looked at their gods and their rituals and saw that both were filled with that most terrible of all equations: fear over ambition.”
―
Frank Herbert
“The people must learn how well I govern them. How would they know if we didn’t tell them?”
―
Frank Herbert
“Black is a blind remembering, she thought. You listen for pack sounds, for the cries of those who hunted your ancestors in a past so ancient only your most primitive cells remember. The ears see. The nostrils see.”
―
Frank Herbert
“It supports a ruling class that lives as ruling classes have lived in all times while, beneath them, a semihuman mass of semislaves exists on the leavings…”
―
Frank Herbert
“What delicious abandon in the sleep of the child. Where do we lose it?”
―
Frank Herbert
“She thought of the boy’s features as an exquisite distillation out of random patterns—endless queues of happenstance meeting at this nexus.”
―
Frank Herbert
“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
“The day hums sweetly when you have enough bees working for you.”
―
Frank Herbert
“The day the flesh shapes and the flesh the day shapes.”
―
Frank Herbert
