They say they seek security and quiet, the condition they call peace. Even as they speak they create the seeds of turmoil and violence.
The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows—a wall against the wind. This is the willow’s purpose. Paul
The thing the ecologically illiterate don’t realize about an ecosystem, Kynes said, is that it’s a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in...
The one-eyed view of our universe says you must not look far afield for problems. Such problems may never arrive. Instead, tend to the wolf within your fences. The packs ranging outside may not even e...
The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture—it begins in the dignity with which we treat our dead.
Sietch: a meeting place in time of danger.
My lungs taste the air of Time,Blown past falling sands…
My Uncle Malky always said the Lord Leto never responded to prayer. He said the Lord Leto looked on prayer as attempted coercion, a form of violence against the chosen god, telling the immortal what t...
Maud’Dib could indeed, see the Future, but you must understand the limits of this power. Think of sight. You have eyes, yet cannot see without light. If you are on the floor of a valley, you cannot se...
It’d be bad enough without the complication of a feudal trade culture which turns its back on most science.
It occurred to her that mercy was the ability to stop, if only for a moment. There was no mercy where there could be no stopping.
It is not always the majestic concerns of Imperial ministers which dictate the course of history, nor is it necessarily the pontifications of priests which move the hands of God.
If wishes were fishes, we'd all cast nets.
Hope clouds observation.
He mastered the inner world while holding the outer in contempt, and this led to catastrophe.
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 a...
Give me the judgment of balanced minds in preference to laws every time. Codes and manuals create patterned behavior. All patterned behavior tends to go unquestioned, gathering destructive momentum. —...
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 t...
For them, 'mektub al mellah', as the Fremen say.The thing was written with salt, Irulan translated.
For the others, 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. It is shocking to find how...