“How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him. —”
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Frank Herbert
“Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part on the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him.”
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Frank Herbert
“I’ll never be a Mentat,” he said. “I’m something else…a freak.”
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Frank Herbert
“We have two chief survivors of those ancient schools: the Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild. The Guild, so we think, emphasizes almost pure mathematics. Bene Gesserit performs another function.”
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Frank Herbert
“The tribal commander must lose no face among those who should obey him. Paul”
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Frank Herbert
“Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife—chopping off what’s incomplete and saying: “Now, it’s complete because it’s ended here.”
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Frank Herbert
“When religion and politics ride the same cart, when that cart is driven by a living holy man (baraka), nothing can stand in their path.”
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Frank Herbert
“Surely not a palm lock, she told herself. A palm lock must be keyed to one individual’s hand shape and palm lines. But it looked like a palm lock. And there were ways to open any palm lock—as she had learned at school.”
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Frank Herbert
“All around the Lady Jessica—piled in corners of the Arrakeen great hall, mounded in the open spaces—stood the packaged freight of their lives: boxes, trunks, cartons, cases—some partly unpacked.”
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Frank Herbert
“You have a nicety of awareness of the difference between a blade's edge and its tip.”
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Frank Herbert
“Pain,” she sniffed. “A human can override any nerve in the body.”
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Frank Herbert
“My son will wear the title well, the Duke thought, and realized with a sudden chill that this was another death thought.”
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Frank Herbert
“This Duke was concerned more over the men than he was over the spice. He risked his own life and that of his son to save the men. 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. Against his own will and all previous judgments, Kynes admitted to himself: I like this Duke.”
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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
“When you imagine mistakes, there can be no self-defense.”
―
Frank Herbert