“He passed off the loss of a spice crawler with a gesture. The threat to men’s lives had him in a rage. A leader such as that would command fanatic loyalty. He would be difficult to defeat.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Do you wrestle with dreams?
Do you contend with shadows?
Do you move in a kind of sleep?
Time has slipped away.
Your life is stolen.
You tarried with trifles,
Victim of your folly.”
―
Frank Herbert
“The Atreides are known to start late getting there growth.”
―
Frank Herbert
“When strangers meet, great allowances should be made for differences in custom and training.”
―
Frank Herbert
“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
“Life produces a different taste each time you take it.”
―
Frank Herbert
“The eye that looks ahead to the safe course is closed forever.”
―
Frank Herbert
“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
“The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realise about an ecosystem is that it's a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That's why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.”
―
Frank Herbert
“And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life -we went soft, we lost our edge.”
―
Frank Herbert
“His voice was low, charged with unspeakable adjectives.”
―
Frank Herbert
“It occurred to her that mercy was the ability to stop, if only for a moment. There was no mercy where there could be no stopping.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Do not make the error of considering my son a child,” the Duke said. And he smiled.”
―
Frank Herbert
