"On Caladan, we ruled with sea and air power," the Duke said. "Here, we must scrabble for desert power. This is your inheritance, Paul."

"Proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you have always known."

"Whether a thought is spoken or not, it is a real thing and has powers of reality."

"Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class -- whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy."

"If you focus your awareness only upon your own rightness, then you invite the forces of opposition to overwhelm you."

"The great mass of humankind possesses an unmistakable unit-identity. It can be one thing. It can act as a single organism."

"Chance is the nature of our universe. Madness represents a chaotic reservoir of surprises. Some surprises can be valuable."

"One moment of incompetence can be fatal."

"Kindness is the beginning of cruelty."

"Paul looked down at the hand that had known pain, and then up to the Reverend Mother. The sound of her voice contained a difference than from any other voicing his experience. The words were outlined in brilliance. There was an edge to them."

"What the eyes had seen could not be erased."

"Wealth is a tool of freedom, but the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery."

"When we encounter personal problems, those things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan."

"Democracy is susceptible to being led astray by having scapegoats paraded in front of the electorate. Get the rich, the greedy, the criminals, the stupid leader and so on ad nauseam."

"Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual. -Words of Muad'dib by Princess Irulan."

"Fear is the mind-killer."

"When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual."

"Constitutions become the ultimate tyranny," Paul said. "They're organized power on such a scale as to be overwhelming. The constitution is social power mobilized and it has no conscience. It can crush the highest and the lowest, removing all dignity and individuality. It has an unstable balance point and no limitations."

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

"We've lost something vital, I tell you. When we lost it, we lost the ability to make good decisions. We fall upon decisions these days the way we fall upon an enemy-or wait and wait, which is a form of giving up, and we allow the decisions of others to move us. Have we forgotten that we were the ones who set this current flowing?"

"One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could be the general and widespread understanding of how severely limited logic really is."

"I come only to ask a simple question. Is Muad'Dib's death to be followed by the moral suicide of all men? Is that the inevitable aftermath of a Messiah?"

"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."

"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 the religion by which you think to govern. Sacred ritual must spring from praise and holy yearnings which hammer out a significant morality. Government, on the other hand, is a cultural organism particularly attractive to doubts, questions and contentions. I see the day coming when ceremony must take the place of faith and symbolism replaces morality."

"Enemies make you stronger, allies make you weaker."

"He who controls the spice controls the universe."

"Money said, "I warn you that ignorance thrives on hysteria."

"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."

"The people who demand that the oracle predict for them really want to know next year's price on whalefur or something equally mundane. None of them wants an instant-by-instant prediction of his personal life."

"They are not mad. They're trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous."

"Liberty and Freedom are complex concepts. They go back to religious ideas of Free Will and are related to the Ruler Mystique implicit in absolute monarchs. Without absolute monarchs patterned after the Old Gods and ruling by the grace of a belief in religious indulgence, Liberty and Freedom would never have gained their present meaning. These ideals owe their very existence to past examples of oppression. And the forces that maintain such ideas will erode unless renewed by dramatic teaching or new oppressions. This is the most basic key to my life."

"Only fools prefer the past!"

"Something cannot emerge from nothing."

"The Fremen have a simple, practical religion, he said."Nothing about religion is simple."

"You must teach me the way you thrust your worries aside and turn to practical matters."

"One learns from books and example only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things."

"One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim."

"A ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel... he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men... a good ruler has to learn his world's language... it's different for every world... the language of the rocks and growing things... the language you don't hear just with your ears... the Mystery of Life... not a problem to solve, but a reality to experience... Understanding must move with the flow of the process."

"For what do you hunger, Lord? Moneo ventured."For a humankind which can make truly long-term decisions. Do you know the key to that ability, Moneo?"You have said it many times, Lord. It is the ability to change your mind."

"Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?"

"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."

"Do you know what guerrillas often say? They claim that their rebellions are invulnerable to economic warfare because they have no economy, that they are parasitic on those they would overthrow. The fools merely fail to access the coin in which they must inevitably pay. The pattern is inexorable in its degenerative failures. You see it repeated in the systems of slavery, of welfare states, of caste-ridden religions, of socializing bureaucracies -- in any system in which creates and maintains dependencies. Too long a parasite and you cannot exist without a host."

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

"Clinging to any form of conservatism can be dangerous. Become too conservative and you are unprepared for surprises. You cannot depend on luck. Logic is blind and often knows only its own past. Logic is good for playing chess but is often too slow for the needs of survival."

"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."

"To accept a little death is worse than death itself."

"Police are inevitably corrupted. ... Police always observe that criminals prosper. It takes a pretty dull policeman to miss the fact that the position of authority is the most prosperous criminal position available."

"Any man who retreats into a cave which has only one opening deserves to die."

"Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous."

"We do not teach history, we recreate the experience. We follow the chain of consequences - the tracks of the beast in its forest. Look behind our words and you see the broad sweep of social behavior that no historian has ever touched."