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. You will sneer at the past, forgetting what I tell you now: within all differences there is unity.
Concealed behind strong barriers the heart becomes ice.
Show no mercy. Never stop. Mercy is a chimera. It can be defeated by the stomach rumbling its hunger, by the throat crying its thirst.
Think of all those experiences, the wisdom they’d bring. But wisdom tempers love, doesn’t it? And it puts a new shape on hate.
The man without emotions is the one to fear.
Freedom is a lonely state.
Have you noticed, Stil, how beautiful the young women are this year?
Peace punishes mistakes without rewarding brilliance.
He felt that his mentat faculties had been dulled, let out a long, shuddering breath. A psychic shadow passed over him. In the emotional darkness of it, he felt himself waiting for some absolute sound – the snap of a branch in a jungle.
Just as individuals are born, mature, breed, and die, so do societies and civilizations and governments.
Guilt and blame grew defuse when memory covered a millennia.
Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself – a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred.
You cannot go on forever stealing what you need without regard to those who come after. The physical qualities of a planet are written into its economic and political record. We have the record in front of us and our course is obvious.
Beware of the truth, gentle Sister. Although much sought after, truth can be dangerous to the seeker. Myths and reassuring lies are much easier to find and believe. If you find a truth, even a temporary one, it can demand that you make painful changes.
Radicals always see matters in terms which are too simple – black and white, good and evil, them and us. By addressing complex matters in that way, they rip open a passage for chaos. The art of government as you call it, is the mastery of chaos.
I need time now to consider the future that is a past within my mind.
Una de las cosas mas peligrosas en el universo es un pueblo ignorante con motivos reales de resentimiento. Pero no hay nada tan peligroso como una sociedad informada e inteligente que mantenga esos resentimientos.
I’m like a person whose hands were kept numb, without sensation from the first moment of awareness – until one day the ability to feel is forced into them. The thought hung in her mind, an enclosing awareness. And I say: “Look! I have no hands!” But the people all around me say: “What are hands?
We don’t die easily. I should be dead now... I will be dead soon... but I can’t stop being an ecologist.
Order generally was a product of human activity. Chaos existed as raw material from which to create order. That was the Mentat approach, giving no unalterable truths but a remarkable lever for decision-making: orderly assemblage of data in a non-discrete system.