The Reverend Mother must combine the seductive wiles of a courtesan with the untouchable majesty of a virgin goddess, holding these attributes in tension so long as the powers of her youth endure. For when...

A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

I point out to you, Marcus Claire Luyseyal, a lesson from past over-machined societies which you appear not to have learned. The devices themselves condition theusers to employ each other the way they employ machines.

Frica este ucigașul minții.

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.

motivating people, forcing them to your will, gives you a cynical attitude toward humanity. It degrades everything it touches.

The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called “spannungsbogen” — which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.

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....

Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.

Black is a blind remembering, she thought. You listen for pack sounds, for the cries of those who hunted your ancestors in a past so ancient only your most primitive cells remember. The ears see....

Small souls who seek power over others first destroy the faith those others might have in themselves.

Government cannot be religious and self-assertive at the same time. Religious experience needs a spontaneity which laws inevitably suppress. And you cannot govern without laws. Your laws eventually must replace morality, replace conscience, replace even...

You have said it many times, Lord. It is the ability to change your mind.

the meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture – it begins in the dignity with which we treat the dead

You have to appreciate life before you want to preserve it,” she said.”And it’s the survivors who maintain the most light and poignant hold upon the beauties of living. Women know this more often than...

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.

Dorastać znaczy stawać się bardziej nikczemnym

Do you wrestle with dreams? Do you contend with shadows? Do you move in a kind of sleep? Time has slipped away. Your life is stolen. You tarried with trifles, Victim of your folly.

But it’s well known that repression makes a religion flourish.

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.

He who controls the spice controls the universe.

Dacă dorințele ar fi pești, ne-am azv rli cu toții năvoadele.

The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it.

Military foolishness is ultimately suicidal. They believe that by risking death they pay the price of any violent behavior against enemies of their own choosing. They have the invader mentality, that false sense of freedom...

The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of...

Does a population have informed consent when that population is not taught the inner workings of its monetary system, and then is drawn, all unknowing, into economic adventures?

A popular man arouses the jealousy of the powerful.

Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.

There is a fundamental tension between science and freedom – no matter how science is viewed by its practitioners nor how freedom is sensed by those who believe they have it.

But one learns from books and reels only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.

A killer with the manners of a rabbit – this is the most dangerous kind.

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.

In 1054, the patriarch of Constantinople and the pope excommunicated each other. That was the end of holiness for both churches.

Life isn’t a problem to be solved. But a reality to be experienced.

I am a leg of the death tripod that will destroy our foes.

Since every individual is accountable ultimately to the self, the formation of that self demands our utmost care and attention.

My father once told me that respect for 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...

Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, absolute power attracts the corruptible.

This myth he’d made out of intricate movements and imagination, out of moonlight and love, out of prayers older than Adam, and gray cliffs and crimson shadows, laments and rivers of martyrs – what had...

The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.’ And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning, ‘That path leads ever down...

But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, “Well, now it’s writing time...

To Suspect your Own Mortality is to Know the Beginning of Terror; To Learn Irrefutably that you are mortal is to Know the End of Terror.

Don’t give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero’s facade you will find a human being who makes human...

These are illusions of popular history which successful religion must promote: Evil men never prosper; only the brave deserve the fair; honesty is the best policy; actions speak louder than words; virtue always triumpths; a...

Most civilisation is based on cowardice. It’s so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in...

Religion, too, is a weapon. What manner of weapon is religion when it becomes the government?

Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.

Every civilization depends on the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness– they cannot work and their civilization collapses

I don’t speak, I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own.

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.