“I'm the well-trained fruit tree. Full of well-trained feelings and abilities and all of them grafted onto me”
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Frank Herbert
“We Bene Gesserit sift people to find the humans.”
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Frank Herbert
“And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning 'That path leads ever down into stagnation.”
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Frank Herbert
“The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called “spannungsbogen”—which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.”
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Frank Herbert
“A man's flesh is his own; the water belongs to the tribe.”
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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.”
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Frank Herbert
“The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows—a wall against the wind. This is the willow’s purpose.”
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Frank Herbert
“He understood terrible purposes. They drove against all odds. They were their own necessity. Paul felt that he had been infected with terrible purpose. He did not know yet what the terrible purpose was.”
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Frank Herbert
“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.”
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Frank Herbert
“Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”
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Frank Herbert
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”
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Frank Herbert
“There is no measuring Muad'Dib's motives by ordinary standards. In the moment of his triumph, he saw the death prepared for him, yet he accepted the treachery. Can you say he did this out of a sense of justice? Whose justice, then? Remember, we speak now of the Muad'Dib who ordered battle drums made from his enemies' skins, the Muad'Dib who denied the conventions of his ducal past with a wave of the hand, saying merely: 'I am the Kwisatz Haderach. That is reason enough.”
―
Frank Herbert