“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
“Piter: Ah-ah, Baron! Is it not regrettable you were unable to devise this delicious scheme by yourself?
Baron: Someday I will have you strangled, Piter.
Piter: Of a certainty, Baron. Enfin! But a kind act is never lost, eh?
Baron: Have you been chewing verite or semuta, Piter?”
―
Frank Herbert
“Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it’s a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.”
―
Frank Herbert
“The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Mood’s a thing for cattle or for making love. You fight when the necessity arises, no matter your mood.”
―
Frank Herbert
“The people who can destroy a thing, they control it.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Any man who retreats into a cave which has only one opening deserves to die.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Paradise on my right, Hell on my left and the Angel of Death behind.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Sometimes I wonder about Piter," the Baron said. "I cause pain out of necessity, but he...I swear he takes a positive delight in it."
―
Frank Herbert
“The thing the ecologically illiterate don’t realize about an ecosystem,” Kynes said, “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, a 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
“wormfaced, crawling, sand-brained piece of lizard turd!”
―
Frank Herbert
“We are the people of Misr,” the old woman rasped. “Since our Sunni ancestors fled from Nilotic al-Ourouba, we have known flight and death. The young go on that our people shall not die.”
―
Frank Herbert
“We pray to a moon: she is round— Luck with us will then abound, What we seek for shall be found In the land of solid ground.”
―
Frank Herbert
