Remember that there exists a certain malevolence about the formation of any social order. It is the struggle for existence by an artificial entity. Despotism and slavery hover at the edges. Many injuries occur and, thus, the need for laws. The law develops its own power structure, creating more wounds and new injustices. Such trauma can be healed by cooperation, not by confrontation. The summons to cooperate identifies the healer.
I realize that humans cannot bear very much reality. Most lives are a flight from selfhood. Most prefer the truths of the stable. You stick your heads into the stanchions and munch contentedly until you die. Others use you for their purposes. Not once do you live outside the stable to lift your head and be your own creature. Muad’Dib came to tell you about that. Without understanding his message, you cannot revere him!
On Caladan, we ruled with sea and air power,” the Duke said. “Here, we must scrabble for desert power. This is your inheritance, Paul.
My son displays a general garment and you claim it’s cut to your fit?” Jessica asked. “What a fascinating revelation.
What’s law? Control? Law filters chaos and what drips through? Serenity? Law – our highest ideal and our basest nature. Don’t look too closely at the law. Do, and you’ll find the rationalized interpretations, the legal casuistry, the precedents of convenience. You’ll find the serenity, which is just another word for death.
He was warrior and mystic, ogre and saint, the fox and the innocent, chivalrous, ruthless, less than a god, more than a man.
Beginnings are such delicate times.
The universe is full of doors.
Don’t sit with your back to any doors.
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.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
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.
It is said in the desert that possession of water in great amount can inflict a man with fatal carelessness.
We will not run,” Paul said. “We’ll move with dignity. We’ll do what must be done.
To use raw power is to make yourself infinitely vulnerable to greater powers.
Ideas are most to feared when they become actions,” Paul said.
Who asks for justice? We make our own justice.
Every religious, business and governmental question has the single derivative: ‘Who will exercise the power?’ Alliances, combines, complexes, they all chase mirages unless they go for the power. All else is nonsense, as most thinking beings come to realize.
I never could bring myself to trust a traitor,” the Baron said. “Not even a traitor I created.
There are many degrees of sight and many degrees of blindness. What senses do we lack that we cannot see another world all around us?