Dune quotations

"Is it defeatist or treacherous for a doctor to diagnose a disease correctly? My only intention is to cure the disease." - Lady Jessica, Frank Herbert's Dune, page 150

"A pity to waste such fighting men as the Duke's, he thought. He smiled more broadly, laughing at himself. Pity should be cruel! He nodded. Failure was, by definition, expendable. The whole universe sat there, open to the man who could make the right decisions. The uncertain rabbits had to be exposed, made to run for their burrows. Else how could you control them and breed them? He pictured his fighting men as bees routing the rabbits. And he thought: The day hums sweetly when you have enough bees working for you." - The Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, Frank Herbert's Dune, page 172

"My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. 'Something cannot emerge from nothing,' he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable 'the truth' can be." - from "Conversations with Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan, Frank Herbert's Dune, page 204

"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." - from "Manual of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan, Frank Herbert's Dune, page 226

"We came from Caladan--a paradise world for our form of life. There existed no need on Caladan to build a physical paradise or a paradise of the mind--we could see the actuality all around us. And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life--we went soft, we lost our edge." - from "Muad'Dib: Conversations" by the Princess Irulan, Frank Herbert's Dune, page 249

"Men and their works have been a disease on the surface of their planets before now," his father said. "Nature tends to compensate for diseases, to remove or encapsulate them, to incorporate them into the system in her own way." - Hallucination of Liet-Kynes, Frank Herbert's Dune, page 268

"Arrakis is a one-crop planet," his father said. "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. It's the masses and the leavings that occupy our attention. These are far more valuable than has ever been suspected." - Hallucination of Liet-Kynes, Frank Herbert's Dune, page 268

"Religion and law among our masses must be one and the same," his father said. "An act of disobedience must be a sin and require religious penalties. This will have the dual benefit of bringing both greater obedience and greater bravery. We must depend not so much on the bravery of individuals, you see, as upon the bravery of a whole population." - Hallucination of Liet-Kynes, Frank Herbert's Dune, page 269

"Paradise on my right, Hell on my left and the Angel of Death behind." - Orange Catholic Bible quotation from Frank Herbert's Dune, page 281

"Give as few orders as possible," his father had told him ... once ... long ago. "Once you've given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject." - thought of Paul Atreides, Frank Herbert's Dune, page 377

"How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him." - "The Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan, Frank Herbert's Dune, page 412

"They'd never known anything but victory which, Paul realized, could be a weakness in itself." - thought of Paul Atreides, Frank Herbert's Dune, page 455

"The Guild navigators, gifted with limited prescience, had made the fatal decision: they'd chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation." - thought of Paul Atreides, Frank Herbert's Dune, page 458