“Our supremacy on Caladan,” the Duke said, “depended on sea and air power. Here, we must develop something I choose to call desert power.
―
Frank Herbert
“Malign? I praise him. Death and deceit are our only hopes now. I just do not fool myself about Thufir’s methods.”
―
Frank Herbert
“There’s a Bene Gesserit saying,” she said. “You have sayings for everything!” he protested. “You’ll like this one,” she said. “It goes: ‘Do not count a human dead until you’ve seen his body. And even then you can make a mistake.”
―
Frank Herbert
“He doesn’t appear much, does he—one frightened old fat man too weak to support his own flesh without the help of suspensors.”
―
Frank Herbert
“She didn’t like the fact that people of both sietch and graben referred to Muad’Dib as Him.”
―
Frank Herbert
“the drowning man who climbs on your shoulders to save himself is understandable—except when you see it happen in the drawing room.”
―
Frank Herbert
“The night is a tunnel, she thought, a hole into tomorrow...”
―
Frank Herbert
“Jessica stopped beside him: ‘What delicious abandon in the sleep of a child.’
He spoke mechanically: ‘If only adults could relax like that.’
‘Yes.’
‘When do we lose it?’ He murmured…
‘We do indeed lose something,’ she said.”
―
Frank Herbert
“The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.”
―
Frank Herbert
“I knew Frank Herbert for more than thirty-eight years. He was a magnificent human being, a man of great honor and distinction, and the most interesting person at any gathering, drawing listeners around him like a magnet. To say he was an intellectual giant would be an understatement, since he seemed to contain all of the knowledge of the universe in his marvelous mind. He was my father, and I loved him deeply.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, ‘I am not the kind of person I want to be.’ It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.”
―
Frank Herbert
“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
“To accept a little death is worse than death itself.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Power and fear," he said. "The tools of statecraft.”
―
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