“Arrakis is a one-crop planet,” his father said. “One crop. 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. It’s the masses and the leavings that occupy our attention. These are far more valuable than has ever been suspected.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Don’t be so sure you know where to draw the line,” he said. “We carry our past with us. And, mother mine, there’s a thing you don’t know and should—we are Harkonnens.”
―
Frank Herbert
“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
“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
“The natural human´s an animal without a logic. Your projection of logic onto all affairs is unnatural.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Growth is limited by the necessity which is present in the least amount. And naturally, the least favorable condition controls the growth rate”
―
Frank Herbert
“This world has emptied me of all but the oldest purpose: tomorrow’s life. I live now for my young Duke and the daughter yet to be.
―
Frank Herbert
“trinocular vision that permitted him to see time-become-space.
―
Frank Herbert
“The real universe is always one step behind logic.”
―
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.”
―
Frank Herbert
“They’ve also sent some incidental things—jewelry for the Lady Jessica, spice liquor, candy, medicinals. My men are processing the lot right now.”
―
Frank Herbert
“They displayed a sophistication in warfare as good as anything he had ever encountered, and he had been trained by the best fighters in the universe then seasoned in battles where only the superior few survived.”
―
Frank Herbert
“I stood upon the sand of the sea and saw a beast rise up out of the sea…and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.”
―
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
“You must learn to rule. It's something none of your ancestors learned.”
―
Frank Herbert
