A smile touched Piter’s lips. “And to think, Baron: the Padishah Emperor believes he’s given the Duke your spice planet. How poignant.
Principles,” he said, “are what you fight for. Most men go through a lifetime unchallenged, except at the final moment. They have so few unfriendly arenas in which to test themselves.
Let us not bandy philosophical nonsense. Every question can be boiled down to the one: Why is there anything?
This is what it means to be human. Try to hold on to youth and it mocks you while it sprints away.
They tried and failed, all of them?” “Oh, no.” She shook her head. “They tried and died.
Humans must never submit to animals.’ “A dry sob shook her. In a low voice, she said: “I’ve been so lonely.” “It should be one of the tests,” the old woman said. “Humans are almost always lonely.
He recalled another thing the old woman had said about a world being the sum of many things – the people, the dirt, the growing things, the moons, the tides, the suns – the unknown sum called nature, a vague summation without any sense of the now. And he wondered: What is the now?
Power attracts the corruptible. Absolute power attracts the absolutely corruptible. This is the danger of entrenched bureaucracy to its subject population. Even spoils systems are preferable because levels of tolerance are lower and the corrupt can be thrown out periodically. Entrenched bureaucracy seldom can be touched short of violence. Beware when Civil Service and Military join hands!
Too few individuals, and a people reverts to a mob.
He thinks that by repeating he creates some kind of truth.
Is it defeatist or treacherous for a doctor to diagnose a disease correctly?
You took the universe as you found it and applied your principles where you could.
Anyone can be a Truthsayer, even you,” The Preacher said. “It’s a matter of self-honesty about the nature of your own feelings. It requires that you have an inner agreement with truth which allows ready recognition.
Quite naturally, holders of power wish to suppress wild research. Unrestricted questing after knowledge has a long history of producing unwanted competition. The powerful want a “safe line of investigations,” which will develop only those products and ideas that can be controlled and, most important, that will allow the larger part of the benefits to be captured by inside investors. Unfortunately, a random universe full of relative variables does not insure such a “safe line of investigations.
When I set out to lead humanity along my Golden Path I promised a lesson their bones would remember. I know a profound pattern humans deny with words even while their actions affirm it. They say they seek security and quiet, conditions they call peace. Even as they speak, they create seeds of turmoil and violence.
Reason arises from pride that a man may not know in this way when he has done evil.
Without even the safety valve of dreaming, he focused his prescient awareness, seeing it as a computation of most probable futures, but with something more, an edge of mystery – as though his mind dipped into some timeless stratum and sampled the winds of the future.
Arrakis – Dune – Desert Planet.
The Universe is God’s. It is one thing, a wholeness against which all separations may be identified. Transient life, even that self-aware and reasoning life which we call sentient, holds only fragile trusteeship on any portion of the wholeness.
So many times you’ve given me comfort and forgetfulness.