God created Arrakis to train the faithful.
You must teach me someday how you do that,” he said, “the way you thrust your worries aside and turn to practical matters. It must be a Bene Gesserit thing.” “It’s a female thing,” she said.
Arrakis makes us moral and ethical.
All rebels are closet aristocrats. That’s why I can convert them so easily.
The old woman was a witch shadow – hair like matted spiderwebs, hooded ’round darkness of features, eyes like glittering jewels.
The knife is more dangerous than the hand and the knife can be in either hand.
Seeing all the chattering faces, Paul was suddenly repelled by them. They were cheap masks locked on festering thoughts – voices gabbling to drown out the loud silence in every breast.
How tempting it is to raise high walls and keep out change. Rot here in our own self-satisfied comfort.
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.
Chaos is no surprise. It has predictable characteristics. For one thing, it carries away order and strengthens the forces at the extremes.
Mood’s a thing for cattle or for making love. You fight when the necessity arises, no matter your mood.
Jessica, hearing the voices, felt the depth of the experience, realized what terrible inhibitions there must be against shedding tears. She focused on the words: “He gives moisture to the dead.” It was a gift to the shadow world – tears. They would be sacred beyond a doubt.
Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me most. I distrust the extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It.
We have a disturbed relationship with our past which religion cannot explain. We are primitive in unexplainable ways, our lives woven of the familiar and the strange, the reasonable and the insane.
The hunter does not seek dead game.
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.
A good ruler has to learn his world’s language, and that’s different for every world, the language you don’t hear just with your ears.
A leader tries to perpetuate the conditions which demand his leadership. Thus, the leader requires the outsider.
He understood terrible purposes. They drove against all odds. They were their own necessity. Paul felt that he had been infected with terrible purpose. He did not know yet what the terrible purpose was.
Power bases are very dangerous because they attract people who are truly insane, people who seek power only for the sake of power.