Caution is the path to mediocrity. Gliding, passionless mediocrity is all that most people think they can achieve.
It could be a work of art among vendettas
A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.
Religion, too, is a weapon. What manner of weapon is religion when it becomes the government?
How ignorant a man can become on a diet of managed history.
There will be sadness," Alia intoned. "I remind you that all things are but beginning, forever beginning. Worlds wait to be conquered. Some within the sound of my voice will attain exalted destinies....
The people who can destroy a thing, they control it.
Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.
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. B...
It has occurred to me more than once that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.
In 1054, the patriarch of Constantinople and the pope excommunicated each other. That was the end of holiness for both churches.
If we deny the need for thought, Moneo, as some do, we lose the powers of reflection; we cannot define what our senses report. If we deny the flesh, we unwheel the vehicle which bears us. But if we de...
I must rule with eye and claw — as the hawk among lesser birds. - Duke Leto Atreides
He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future. Things persisted in not being what they seemed.
Do actions agree with words? There's your measure of reliability. Never confine yourself to the words.
What are you, child, that you need time to learn about yourself?
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.
Dangers lurk in all systems. Systems incorporate the unexamined beliefs of their creators. Adopt a system, accept its beliefs, and you help strengthen the resistance to change
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 t...