"In their passion for sameness, the tyrants made themselves more and more powerful. All others grew correspondingly weaker and weaker. New bureaus and directorates, odd ministries, leaped into existence for the most improbable purposes. These became the citadels of a new aristocracy, rulers who kept the giant wheel of government careening along, spreading destruction, violence, and chaos wherever they touched."

"The man without emotions is the one to fear."

"But oh, the perils of leadership in a species so anxious to be told what to do. How little they knew of what they created by their demands. Leaders made mistakes. And those mistakes, amplified by the numbers who followed without questioning, moved inevitably toward great disasters."

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

"And the question of Wester religion, Flattery said, "is: What lies beyond death? But the question of the Zen master is: What lies beyond waking?"

"You have a nicety of awareness of the difference between a blade's edge and its tip."

"Create or arouse such unbridled forces and you built carnal fantasies of enormous complexity. You could lead whole populations around by their desires, by their fantasy projections."

"It is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past."

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

"Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality."

"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 truth' can be."

"Safaris through ancestral memories teach me many things. The patterns, ahhh, the patterns. Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me the most. I distrust extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It's true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who from such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of course, all bureaucracies follow this pattern, but what a hypocrisy to find this even under a communized banner."

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

"When a Truthsayer's gifted by the drug, she can look many places in her memory - in her body's memory. We look down so many avenues of the past... but only feminine avenues... Yet there's a place no Truthsayer can see. We are repelled by it, terrorized. It is said a man will come one day and find in the gift of the drug his inward eye. He will look where we cannot - into both feminine and masculine pasts... Many men have tried the drug... so many, but none has succeeded.""They tried and failed, all of them?""They tried and died."

"As long as my Duke remains unmarried some of the Great Houses can still hope for alliance."

"The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture - it begins in the dignity with which we treat the dead."

"And loyalty is a valued commodity. It can be sold . . . not bought, but sold."

"How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him."

"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."

"Dune was a world of paradox now-a world under siege, yet the center of power. To come under siege, he decided, was the inevitable fate of power."

"If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual."

"The test of a man isn't what you think he'll do. It's what he actually does."

"A single obscure decision of prophecy, perhaps the choice of one word over another, could change the entire aspect of the future. He tells us "The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door."

"You do not beg the sun for mercy.-Maud'dib's Travail from The Stilgar Commentary."

"We had something few experience. We were joined in our strengths rather than in our weaknesses."

"Guilt starts as a feeling of failure."

"The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion."

"Face your fears or they will climb over your back."

"Most discipline is hidden discipline, designed not to liberate but to limit. Do not ask Why? Be cautious with How? Why? leads inexorably to paradox. How? traps you in a universe of cause and effect. Both deny the infinite."

"It has occurred to me more than once that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will."

"There are proven ways to win the loyalty of tough, strong, ferocious men: play on the certain knowledge of their superiority, the mystique of secret covenant, the esprit of shared suffering."

"No matter how much we ask after the truth, self-awareness is often unpleasant. We do not feel kindly toward the Truthsayer."

"At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers. Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play. For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events. If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order."

"Move slowly and the day of your revenge will come," Tuek said. "Speed is a device of Shaitan. Cool your sorrow"we've the diversions for it; three things there are that ease the heart"water, green grass, and the beauty of woman."

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

"What you of the CHOAM directorate seem unable to understand is that you seldom find real loyalties in commerce ... Men must want to do things of their own innermost drives. People, not commercial organisations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work, every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you overorganize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness - they cannot work and their civilization collapses."

"Fannie Mae had aroused his anger, then reduced his anger to verbal breast-beating, and finally to silent hurt. Still, the love remained. Why?"

"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."

"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 mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem. It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced - in a word, insane."

"You can not go on forever stealing what you need without regard to those who come after."

"The flesh surrenders itself. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not...yet, I occurred."

"A stone is heavy and the sand is weighty, but a fool's wrath is heavier than them both."

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

"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 and now I'll write."

"I'm going to rub your faces in things you try to avoid. I don't find it strange that all you want to believe is only that which comforts you. How else do humans invent the traps which betray us into mediocrity? How else do we define cowardice?"

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

"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."

"A popular man arouses the jealousy of the powerful."

"To be a god can ultimately become boring and degrading. There'd be reason enough for the invention of free will! A god might wish to escape into sleep and be alive only in the unconscious projections of his dream-creatures."

"Governments always commit their entire populations when the demands grow heavy enough. By their passive acceptance, these populations become accessories to whatever is done in their name."