“Never obliterate a man unthinkingly, the way an entire fief might do it through some due process of law. Always do it for an overriding purpose—and know your purpose!”
―
Frank Herbert
“Do you wrestle with dreams?
Do you contend with shadows?
Do you move in a kind of sleep?
Time has slipped away.
Your life is stolen.
You tarried with trifles,
Victim of your folly.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Shishakli presented two thin, whiplike shafts as Paul approached. The shafts were about a meter and a half long with glistening plasteel hoods at one end, roughened at the other end for a firm grip. Paul accepted them both in his left hand as required by the ritual. “They are my own hooks,” Shishakli said in a husky voice. “They never have failed.”
―
Frank Herbert
“You have a nicety of awareness of the difference between a blade's edge and its tip.”
―
Frank Herbert
“The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows - a wall against the wind.”
―
Frank Herbert
“You must be always hungry and thirsty.” The Baron caressed his bulges beneath the suspensors. “Like me.”
―
Frank Herbert
“He looked, from behind, like a fleshless stick figure in overlarge black clothing, a caricature poised for stringy movement at the direction of a puppet master.
―
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
“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
“He found that he no longer could hate the Bene Gesserit or the Emperor or even the Harkonnens. They were all caught up in the need of their race to renew its scattered inheritance, to cross and mingle and infuse their bloodlines in a great new pooling of genes. And the race knew only one sure way for this—the ancient way, the tried and certain way that rolled over everything in its path: jihad. Surely,”
―
Frank Herbert
“ruling class that lives as ruling classes have lived in all times while, beneath them, a semihuman mass of semislaves exists on the leavings.
―
Frank Herbert
“And that day dawned when Arrakis lay at the hub of the universe with the wheel poised to spin.”
―
Frank Herbert
“One must always keep the tools of statecraft sharp and ready. Power and fear – sharp and ready.”
―
Frank Herbert
“A man's flesh is his own; the water belongs to the tribe.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Men looked at their gods and their rituals and saw that both were filled with that most terrible of all equations: fear over ambition.”
―
Frank Herbert
