“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
“When strangers meet, great allowances should be made for differences in custom and training.”
―
Frank Herbert
“They’ve lost the initiative, which means they’ve lost the war.” Gurney”
―
Frank Herbert
“There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it’s almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman, the situation is reversed…These things are so ancient within us…that they’re ground into each separate cell of our bodies…It’s as easy to be overwhelmed by giving as by taking.”
―
Frank Herbert
“I am a leg of the death tripod that will destroy our foes.”
―
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
“Paul shrugged. “Then she said a good ruler has to learn his world’s language, that it’s different for every world. And I thought she meant they didn’t speak Galach on Arrakis, but she said that wasn’t it at all. She said she meant the language of the rocks and growing things, the language you don’t hear just with your ears. And I said that’s what Dr. Yueh calls the Mystery of Life.” Hawat chuckled. “How’d that sit with her?” “I think she got mad. She said the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”
―
Frank Herbert
“they’d chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation.”
―
Frank Herbert
“She asked me to tell her what it is to rule,” Paul said. “And I said that one commands. And she said I had some unlearning to do.” She hit a mark there right enough, Hawat thought. He nodded for Paul to continue. “She said a ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel. She said he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men.”
―
Frank Herbert
“At the age of fifteen, he had already learned silence.”
―
Frank Herbert
“The price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life -we went soft, we lost our edge.”
―
Frank Herbert
“I never could bring myself to trust a traitor,” the Baron said. “Not even a traitor I created.”
―
Frank Herbert
“The knife is more dangerous than the hand and the knife can be in either hand.”
―
Frank Herbert
“you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us? What is there around us that we cannot—”
―
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