If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
It is a wise man that does know the contented man is never poor, whilst the discontented man is never rich.
Kindness is the beginning of cruelty.
To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.
When politics and religion are intermingled, a people is suffused with a sense of invulnerability, and gathering speed in their forward charge, they fail to see the cliff ahead of them.
Truth suffers from too much analysis.
The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.
If wishes were fishes, we’d all cast nets.
Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert.
Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place.
Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect any who seek it.
Do actions agree with words? There’s your measure of reliability. Never confine yourself to the words.
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.
Beware! The mind of the believer stagnates. It fails to grow outward into an unlimited, infinite universe.
The best prophets lead you up to the curtain and let you peer through for yourself.
You aren’t thinking or really existing unless you’re willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgement of your existence.
There is no escape – we pay for the violence of our ancestors.
Hope clouds observation.
All men seek to be enlightened. Religion is but the most ancient and honorable way in which men have striven to make sense out of God’s universe. Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.