Paul sat down where Hawat had been, straightened the papers. One more day here, he thought. He looked around the room. We’re leaving. The idea of departure was suddenly more real to him than it had ever been before. 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?
But the universe would not turn backward. It was a great engine projected upon the grey void of nonexistence.
He mastered the inner world while holding the outer in contempt, and this led to catastrophe.
They learned early that sharing secret or private names was an ancient device for ensnaring a person in affections.
The problem with leadership is that leaders are human beings. And when they make mistakes, their mistakes are amplified by the numbers who follow without question.
The thing about computers – it’s like training a dog. You have to be smarter than the dog. If you make a computer smarter than you are, that has to be accident, synergy, or divine intervention.
Your own emperor bestowed Arrakis on House Atreides. I am House Atreides.” The.
If some crazy bastard tossed you into a lake when you couldn’t swim, and you learned to swim like that” – Bickel snapped his fingers – “and you found then you could just keep on going, wouldn’t you swim like hell to get away from the crazy bastard?
She didn’t like the fact that people of both sietch and graben referred to Muad’Dib as Him.
I have another kind of sight. I see another kind of terrain: the available paths. The.
One of the most dangerous things in the universe is an ignorant people with real grievances. That is nowhere near as dangerous, however, as an informed and intelligent society with grievances.
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.
Can you take him, Gurney?” “M’Lord jests!
One doesn’t need telepathy to read your intentions.
The spice must flow.
Power attracts the corruptible. Absolute power attracts the absolutely corruptible. This is the danger of entrenched bureaucracy to its subject population.
Individual human experience is not the overriding control factor in human behavior. The cellular social pattern dominates.
If you believe certain words, you believe their hidden arguments. When you believe something is right or wrong, true or false, you believe the assumptions in the words which express the arguments. Such assumptions are often full of holes, but remain most precious to the convinced. – The Open-Ended Proof from the Panoplia Prophetica Leto’s.
And again he remembered the vision of fanatic legions following the green and black banner of the Atreides, pillaging and burning across the universe in the name of their prophet Muad’Dib. That must not happen, he told himself.
It’s a subtle and powerful thing, prescience. The future becomes now. To be sighted in the land of the blind carries its own perils. If you try to interpret what you see for the blind, you tend to forget that the blind possess an inherent movement conditioned by their blindness. They are like a monstrous machine moving along its own path. They have their own momentum, their own fixations. I fear the blind, Stil. I fear them. They can so easily crush anything in their path.