Quotes from Frank Herbert

Paradise on my right, Hell on my left, and the Angel of Death behind.

A smile touched Piter's lips. "And to think, Baron: the Padishah Emperor believes he's given the Duke your spice planet. How poignant.

To know a thing well, know its limits. Only when pushed beyond its tolerances will true nature be seen.

In the Bene Gesserit Way, he opened his mind to Jacurutu, seeking to know nothing about it. Knowing was a barrier which prevented learning. For a few moments he allowed himself merely to resonate, making no demands, asking no questions.

The human mind, as is the case with the mind of any animal, is a resonator. It responds to resonances in the environment.

The future is a thing to be shaped, Scytale said. Hold that thought, Princess.

So many times you've given me comfort and forgetfulness.

The attack by those who want to die — this is the attack against which you cannot prepare a perfect defense. — Human aphorism

The more control, the more that requires control. This is the road to chaos. — PanSpechi aphorism

For now my grief is heavier than the sands of the seas, she thought. This world has emptied me of all but the oldest purpose: tomorrow's life.

I am a collection of the obsolete, a relic of the damned, of the lost and strayed. I am the waylaid pieces of history which sank out of sight in all of our pasts.

Arrakis is a one-crop planet [...] 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.

I told my nephew of the great esteem our Emperor holds for you, Count Fenring," the Baron said. And he thought: Mark him well, Feyd! A killer with the manners of a rabbit—this is the most dangerous kind.

In politics, the tripod is he most unstable of all structures. It's be bad enough without the complication of a feudal trade culture which turns its back on most science.

For the others, we can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson. —

In doing good, avoid notoriety; in doing evil, avoid self-awareness.

Paul had been caught more by her tone—singsong and wavering—than by her words. "When you live upon Arrakis," she had said, "khala, the land is empty. The moons will be your friends, the sun your enemy." Paul had sensed his mother come up beside him away from her post guarding the door. She had looked at the Reverend Mother and asked: "Do you see no hope, Your Reverence?" "Not for the father.

What terrible things we do to those we love!

The Lord Leto says that when it was denied an external enemy, the all-male army always turned against its own population. Always.

Expediency was the first word in his catechism, although he gave proper lip-service to the precepts of the Butlerians. Machines could not be fashioned in the image of a man's mind, he said, but he betrayed by every action that he preferred machines to men, statistics to individuals, the faraway general view to the intimate personal touch requiring imagination and initiative. As

Principles," he said, "are what you fight for. Most men go through a lifetime unchallenged, except at the final moment. They have so few unfriendly arenas in which to test themselves.

How many times must I tell that lad never to settle himself with his back to a door?

He aspires to rule my Barony, yet he cannot rule himself.

Umman Kudu: scissors-line of jaw muscles, chin like a boot toe - a man to be trusted because the captain's vices were known.