Frank Herbert

"You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind."

We are generalists. You can't draw neat lines around planet-wide problems. Planetology is a cut-and-fit science.

Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. 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.

No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.

Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

"Your mother wanted me to be the one to tell you, Son. You see, you may have Mentat capabilities."

Paul stared at his father, unable to speak for a moment, then: "A Mentat? Me? But I…"

"Hawat agrees, Son. It's true."

"But I thought Mentat training had to start during infancy and the subject couldn't be told because it might inhibit the early…" He broke off, all his past circumstances coming to focus in one flashing computation. "I see," he said.

Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.

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.

There is no escape — we pay for the violence of our ancestors.

A world is supported by four things...the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing... without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!

When God hath ordained a creature to die in a particular place, He causeth that creature's wants to direct him to that place.

He shall know your ways as if born to them.