“One of the most terrible moments in a boy’s life,” Paul said, “is when he discovers his father and mother are human beings who share a love that he can never quite taste. It’s a loss, an awakening to the fact that the world is there and here and we are in it alone. The moment carries its own truth; you can’t evade it. I heard my father when he spoke of my mother. She’s not the betrayer, Gurney.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free.”
―
Frank Herbert
“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…”
―
Frank Herbert
“What a dolt my father sends me for weaponry,” Paul intoned. “This doltish Gurney Halleck has forgotten the first lesson for a fighting man armed and shielded.” Paul snapped the force button at his waist, felt the crinkled-skin tingling of the defensive field at his forehead and down his back, heard external sounds take on characteristic shield-filtered flatness. “In shield fighting, one moves fast on defense, slow on attack,” Paul said. “Attack has the sole purpose of tricking the opponent into a misstep, setting him up for the attack sinister. The shield turns the fast blow, admits the slow kindjal!” Paul snapped up the rapier, feinted fast and whipped it back for a slow thrust timed to enter a shield’s mindless defenses.”
―
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
“She didn’t like the fact that people of both sietch and graben referred to Muad’Dib as Him.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Color streamed into a toe of darkness testing the sand.”
―
Frank Herbert
“In politics, the tripod is the most unstable of all structures.”
―
Frank Herbert
“The Fremen have a simple, practical religion,” he said.
“Nothing about religion is simple.”
―
Frank Herbert
“The day hums sweetly when you have enough bees working for you.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Sad? Nonsense! Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place.”
―
Frank Herbert
“And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning 'That path leads ever down into stagnation.”
―
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
“Try looking into that place where you dare not look! You'll find me there, staring out at you!”
―
Frank Herbert