Posted on
Friday 29 April 2005
- All governments needed to remain under suspicion during their time of power. Trust no government! Not even mine! (Chapterhouse: Dune)
- All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted. (Chapterhouse: Dune)
- All men beneath your position covet your position. (Dune)
- A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it. (Dune)
- 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. (Dune)
- Anything less than abject submission has to have some attack in it.
- 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. (Dune)
- Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is true of humans in the infinite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules sealed in a flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.
- Control the coinage and the courts — let the rabble have the rest. If you want profits, you must rule. There is truth in those words, but I ask myself who are the rabble and who are the ruled? (Dune)
- 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. (Dune Messiah)
- Enemies make you stronger, allies make you weaker.
- He who can destroy a thing, can control a thing.
- How easy it is to kill the uprooted plant, especially when you put it down in hostile soil. (Dune)
- How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.
- Humans live best when each has his own place, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things. Destroy the place and destroy the person. (Dune)
- If you believe yourself sufficiently hungry, you will eat your own thoughts.
- If you rely only on your eyes, your other senses weaken. (Dune)
- 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.
- I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
- It is a wise man that does know the contented man is never poor, whilst the discontented man is never rich…
- It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad’Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.
- Kindness is the beginning of cruelty.
- Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent natural regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it. (Chenoeh: “Coversations with Leto II”)
- Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit. This is the fine point on which all legal professions of history have based their job security.
- 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.
- Paired opposites define your longings and those longings imprison you.
- People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.
- Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect all who seek it. (Chapterhouse: Dune)
- Question: Who governs the governors? Answer: Entropy
- Radicals are only to be feared when you try to suppress them. You must demonstrate that you will use the best of what they offer.
- Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ablility to learn. The judgemental precedents of law function that way, littering your path with dead ends. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.
- Religion often partakes of the myth of progress that shields us from the terrors of an uncertain future.
- Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.
- Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.
- Something cannot emerge from nothing.
- The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.
- The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.
- 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 his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy.
- The difference between sentiment and being sentimental is the following: Sentiment is when a driver swerves out of the way to avoid hitting a rabbit on the road. Being sentimental is when the same driver, when swerving away from the rabbit, hits a pedestrian.
- The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it.
- The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.
- The price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving paradise in this life–we went soft, we lost our edge. (Dune)
- The proximity of a desirable thing tempts one to overindulgence. On that path lies danger.
- There are limits to power, as those who put their hopes in a constitution always discover.
- There is no escape - we pay for the violence of our ancestors.
- The stakes in conflict do not change. Battle determines who will control the wealth or its equivalent.
- The undeserving maintain power by promoting hysteria.
- The writing of history is largely a process of diversion. Most historical accounts distract attention from the secret influences behind every great event. (Chapterhouse: Dune)
- To attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood. It is the attempt to see the Light without knowing the Darkness. It cannot be.
- To endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe. You cannot hire a wise man or any other intellect to solve it for you. There’s no writ of inquest or calling of witness to provide answers. No servant or disciple can dress the wound. You dress it yourself or continue bleeding for all to see.
- 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.
- Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know.
- Wealth is a tool of freedom, but the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.
- We should grant power over affairs only to those who are reluctant to hold it and then only under conditions that increase the reluctance. (Chapterhouse: Dune)
- We tend to become like the worst in those we oppose. (Chapterhouse: Dune)
- 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.
- Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.
- What do you despise? By this are you truly known.
- You should never be in the company of anyone with whom you would not want to die.