Dune, Book I

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.

A popular man arouses the jealousy of the powerful. (Hawat)

"Teaching is one thing," she said, "the basic ingredient is another.” (Reverend Mother Gaius Helen
Mohiam)

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face
my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the
inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." (Bene
Gesserit, the Lithany against Fear)

"Hope clouds observation."

- "Why do you test for humans?" he asked.

- "To set you free."
- "Free?"
- "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."
- " 'Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind,' "
- "But what the O.C. Bible should've said is: 'Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a
human mind.'

- "They tried and failed, all of them?"

- "Oh, no." She shook her head. "They tried and died."

..the attempt to see the Light without knowing Darkness. It cannot be.

Shield your son too much .. and he'll not grow strong enough to fulfill any destiny.

- You fight when the necessity arises - no matter the mood! Mood's a thing for cattle or
making love or playing the baliset. It's not for fighting.
- I'm sorry, Gurney.
- You're not sorry enough!

Still, one must ask: What is the son but an extension of the father?

- "But every report on Salusa Secundus says S.S. is a hell world!"

- "Undoubtedly. But if you were going to raise tough, strong, ferocious men, what
environmental conditions would you impose on them?"
- "How could you win the loyalty of such men?"

"The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance." Yes -- I am
meeting more resistance lately. I could use a quiet retreat by myself. (Lady Jessica)
 - "You know that, my Lady!"
- I know it now, Jessica thought.

..we can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first
lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not
believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.

Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to
test that it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.

The whole theory of warfare is calculated risk.

What do you despise? By this are you truly known.

At the age of fifteen, he had already learned silence.

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the
real universe is always one step beyond logic.

- "The Fremen have a simple, practical religion," he said.

- "Nothing about religion is simple," she warned.

This is a brave woman.. She holds to the niceties even when fear is almost overwhelming her. Yes.
She may be the one we need now.

I have seen a friend become a worshiper.

Isn't it odd how we misunderstand the hidden unity of kindness and cruelty?

..wisdom tempers love, doesn't it? And it puts a new shape on hate.

Kynes wasn't brave; he merely had that single-mindedness and caution.

Dune, Book II (Dune Messiah)

They're trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.

An object seen from a distance betrays only its principle. .. That which is dark and evil may be seen
for evil at any distance.

Wild Fremen said it well: "Four things cannot be hidden -- love, smoke, a pillar of fire and a man
striding across the open bled."

- And why do the damned things have that many lights if we're not supposed to try for them?
- A Bene Gesserit should ask the reasoning behind an open-ended system?

You do not beg the sun for mercy.

When a creature has developed into one thing, he will choose death rather than change into his
opposite.
"Often, I must speak otherwise than I think. That is called diplomacy."

Paul, observing the play of emotion around him, felt abruptly that he no longer knew these people.
He could see only strangers.

The pitfall of Bene Gesserit training, she reminded herself, lay in the powers granted: such powers
predisposed one to vanity and pride. But power deluded those who used it. One tended to believe
power could overcome any barrier . . . including one's own ignorance.

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?’

The chameleon thinks a change of shape will hide him from anything.

"What is enduring about beauty and pleasure?" Edric demanded. "We will destroy both Atreides.
Culture! They dispense culture the better to rule. Beauty! They promote the beauty which enslaves.
They create a literate ignorance -- easiest thing of all.

No matter how exotic human civilization becomes, no matter the developments of life and society
nor the complexity of the machine / human interface, there always come interludes of lonely power
when the course of humankind, the very future of humankind, depends upon the relatively simple
actions of single individuals.

How little she understood the bitter choice. Selecting among agonies .. made even lesser agonies
near unbearable.

Growing older is to grow more wicked.

One hungered for absolutes which could never be. Hungering, one lost the present.

Too much freedom breeds chaos. We can't have that, can we?

..That Fremen quality of violence: they could kill casually with no sense of guilt.

.....-- the replacement of morality and conscience with law.

Visions of the future could not be manipulated as formulas. One had to enter them, risking life and
sanity.

Death was a necessity that life might continue.

Now I am free.

Book III Children of Dune

Failure to make a decision was in itself a decision.

Too much knowledge never makes for simple decisions.

Guilt and blame grew diffuse when memory covered millennia.

..one observes the survivors and learns from them.

.. valuable more for the fact that she was a daughter of Shaddam IV than for any other reason; often
too proud to exert herself in extending her capabilities. Now she chose sides with an abruptness
which did no credit to her training.

- „I possessed a more philosophic bent; I studied for the priesthood."

- And insured the preservation of your skin, she thought.

She shook her head, not doubting him, but unwilling to search those depths where he gathered such
information.

It was difficult to think of this mindless little creature as a shaper of enormous events.

.. that innocuous look of innocence which so often masks cynical knowledge in the young.

. .Those who sought the future hoped to gain the winning gamble on tomorrow's race.

Logic's useless unless it's armed with essential data.

People often learn subtlety as they age.

"Most deadly errors arise from obsolete assumptions.”

A large populace held in check by a small but powerful force is quite a common situation in our
universe. And we know the major conditions wherein this large populace may turn upon its keepers -
"One: When they find a leader. This is the most volatile threat to the powerful; they must retain
control of leaders.
"Two: When the populace recognizes its chains. Keep the populace blind and unquestioning.
"Three: When the populace perceives a hope of escape from bondage. They must never even believe
that escape is possible!

... people had to be taught that opposition was always punished and assistance to the ruler was
always rewarded.

It is very difficult ... to learn how to work your own mind. You learn first that the mind must be
allowed to work itself. That's very strange. You can work your own muscles, exercise them,
strengthen them, but the mind acts of itself. Sometimes, when you have learned this about the mind,
it shows you things you do not want to see.

The computational thoughts had clean edges, sharp relief. There were no blurred between-places.

.. have always been short on faith and long on pragmatism.

If one could not depend upon tradition, then where was the rock upon which to anchor his life?

Of course a man and woman who loved each other would share the pleasure of their bodies! It was a
private and beautiful thing, not to be paraded in casual conversation...

When you try the hardest, just then, you most often fail.
Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern.
The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that
machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing
leaders.

How seductive it is to live in peace.

If you put away those who report accurately, you'll keep only those who know what you want to
hear. "I can think of nothing more poisonous than to rot in the stink of your own reflections."

[ ... ]This is the correct path; we do the right thing. But he knew how dangerous it was to be right in
this universe. Their survival now demanded vigor and fitness and an understanding of the limitations
in every moment.

One cannot have a single thing without its opposite.

- "She risks civil war," he said.

- "Do you believe it'll come to that?"
- Idaho shrugged. "Probably not. These are softer times. There are more people willing to
listen to pleasant arguments."

"Alia grasps the power firmly now." She looked back at Idaho. "You understand? One uses power by
grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim."

Why do I feel a sense of loss? he wondered. What am I losing? The answer was obvious: he was
losing his carefree days, time for those pursuits of the mind which so attracted him.

When it's overexploited, even loyalty wears out finally.

Above all else, the mentat must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise to have decisions of great
moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos.

"Irony often masks the inability to think beyond one's assumptions.”

... 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.

Is your religion real when it costs you nothing and carries no risk? Is your religion real when you
fatten upon it? Is your religion real when you commit atrocities in its name? Whence comes your
downward degeneration from the original revelation?

I'm going to rub your faces in things you try to avoid. I don't find it strange that all you want to
believe is only that which comforts you. How else do humans invent the traps which betray us into
mediocrity? How else do we define cowardice?'

To exist is to stand out, away from the background," The Preacher said. "You aren't thinking or really
existing unless you're willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgment of your existence."
The absence says more than the presence when it comes to desert survival.

"There's unknown all around at every moment. That's where you seek knowledge."

Man is a creature of only that light which protects him.

st.

= = = = = = Because of the one-pointed Time awareness in which the conventional mind remains
immersed, humans tend to think of everything in a sequential, word-oriented framework. This
mental trap produces very short-term concepts of effectiveness and consequences, a condition of
constant, unplanned response to crises.

The malady of indifference is what destroys many things.

.. he felt that his inner awareness was his true being and his outer existence was the trance.

Somewhere he had to find wisdom, an inner balance which would reflect upon the universe and
return to him an image of calm strength.

My mind controls my reality.

You will become whatever it is you most deeply desire. [...] Unless you learn to control your desires
the way you control your reality.

... but she ignored it with a single-mindedness which spoke of harsh training and explicit instructions
for her present behavior.

. The trouble with peace is that it tends to punish mistakes instead of rewarding brilliance.

The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires.

! Men must want to do things out of their own innermost drives. People, not commercial
organizations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work. Every civilization
depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize
them, suppress their urge to greatness -- they cannot work and their civilization collapses.

Bold selection could change provisional futures. What boldness did this moment require?

Seen from a distance, only the patterns lay revealed and those patterns tempted one to belief in
absolutes. In absolutes, we may lose our way. One had to remember that patterns change.

The arifa knew the ways to slay a demon and was always chosen "because he has the wisdom to be
ruthless without being cruel, to know when kindness is in fact the way to greater cruelty."

The innocent move without care.

Only fools let a prisoner escape.

... trying for some ultimate control of the universe, you only built weapons with which the universe
eventually defeated you.
There was a certain cleanliness about facing an unknown future.

... but Leto possessed two advantages: he had committed himself upon a path from which there
was no turning back, and he had accepted the terrible consequences to himself. His father still hoped
there was a way back and had made no final commitment.

"We Fremen don't feel guilt for the same things that arouse such feelings in others".

It's an old, old trick of autocratic rule," Idaho said. "Alia knows it well. Good subjects must feel guilty.
The guilt begins as a feeling of failure. The good autocrat provides many opportunities for failure in
the populace.”

It is said that the only fear we cannot correct is the fear of our own mistakes.

And Alia was a creature on a pedestal, involved only in being colossal while she drifted farther and
farther from reality.

To be a god can ultimately become boring and degrading. There'd be reason enough for the
invention of free will! A god might wish to escape into sleep and be alive only in the unconscious
projections of his dream-creatures.

= = The child who refuses to travel in the father's harness, this is the symbol of man's most unique
capability. "I do not have to be what my father was. I do not have to obey my father's rules or even
believe everything he believed. It is my strength as a human that I can make my own choices of what
to believe and what not to believe, of what to be and what not to be."

The assumption that a whole system can be made to work better through an assault on its conscious
elements betrays a dangerous ignorance. This has often been the ignorant approach of those who
call themselves scientists and technologists.

It was an appeal to the guts, not to the mind.

Book IV God Emperor of Dune

... failure is its own demonstration.

... holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.

Enemies strengthen you. Allies weaken.

Moneo had entered that peculiar human state where he longed for death.

. I have always been as concerned with the shaping of dreams as with the shaping of actions.

The influence of geography on history went mostly unrecognized. Humans tended to look more at
the influence of history on geography.

"You always were quick, Duncan." Except when you were slow.

He knows me so well, but l despair of his ever understanding me.

But don't we always hate what we fear?

Moneo, with that clock ticking in his breast, is the goad to duty.

Then again ... perhaps show is a form of protection.

. If you find a truth, even a temporary one, it can demand that you make painful changes. Conceal
your truths within words. Natural ambiguity will protect you then. Words are much easier to
absorb...

... How soothing it is to forget. And how dangerous!

Hwi Noree waited patiently while Leto mused. Not the slightest sign of impatience surfaced.
Beautiful, he thought.

"Knowledge does not suppress such feelings. „

When alarmed, you cling to your native language because all the other patterned sounds are strange.

- "M'Lord, all the envoys will feel fear at this."

- "Yes. I teach a lesson in responsibility."
- "M'Lord?"
- "Membership in a conspiracy, as in an army, frees people from the sense of personal
responsibility."

That is the beginning of knowledge-the discovery of something we do not understand.

Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies The bureaucracies betray the true intent of
people who form such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the
governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands
of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of course, all bureaucracies follow this pattern..

But why should I object? They are what l made them.

Their heads know what their bodies deny.

... betrayed no change of expression, which was betrayal enough by itself.

- Specialists are not to be trusted," Leto said. "Specialists are masters of exclusion, experts in
the narrow.
- "We hope to be architects of a better future." Anteac said.

It was such a pleasure to see a professional performing at her best.

The devices themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines.

Religion suppresses curiosity.

Many could understand it. What people do with understanding is another matter.

She was intelligence built on profound sensitivity, without any of Malky's hedonistic weaknesses. She
was frightening in her perfection.
... birth is the reflection of death.

- I already have good administrators -uncorruptible, sagacious, philosophical and open about
their errors, quick to see decisions.
- They were rebels?
- Most of them.
- How are they chosen?
- I could say they chose themselves.
- By surviving?
- That, too. But there's more. The difference between a good administrator and a bad one is
about five heartbeats. Good administrators make immediate choices.
- Acceptable choices?
- They usually can be made to work. A bad administrator, on the other hand, hesitates, diddles
around, asks for committees, for research and reports. Eventually, he acts in ways which
create serious problems.
- But don't they sometimes need more information to make. . .
- A bad administrator is more concerned with reports than with decisions. He wants the hard
record which he can display as an excuse for his errors.
- And good administrators?
- Oh, they depend on verbal orders. They never lie about what they've done if their verbal
orders cause problems, and they surround themselves with people able to act wisely on the
basis of verbal orders. Often, the most important piece of information is that something has
gone wrong. Bad administrators hide their mistakes until it's too late to make corrections.

Truth is my first loyalty.

... aristocracy looks mostly to the past.

- "All gods have this problem, Hwi. In the perception of deeper needs, I must often ignore
immediate ones. Not addressing immediate needs is an offense to the young."
- "Could you not reason with her and. . ."
- "Never attempt to reason with people who know they are right!"

Directly to the point! She would not deviate. It spoke of a strong inner sense of identity. [..]He began
to enjoy the leaps of her intellect. She had that sure, hunting curiosity...

... your liberties all vanish when you look up to any absolute ruler.

- "My Uncle Malky used to say that love was a bad bargain because you get no guarantees."
- "Your Uncle Malky was a wise man."
- "He was stupid! Love needs no guarantees."

The longer I endure, the more vulnerable I become.

It always astonished him how a desert provoked thoughts of religion.

If the demands of your flesh are for maturity, but something holds you in adolescence, quite nasty
behavior develops. Let go.
You're. . . you're just an older model.

She had the beginnings of that intense loyalty to traveling companions which desert folk always
trusted. [ .. ] We know, he thought. If you are separated from your companions, you are lost among
dunes and rocks. The lone traveler in the desert is dead. Only the worm lives alone out here.

"They were magnificently alive in the old days, those Fremen," he said. "And their eye for beauty was
limited to that which was useful. I never met a greedy Fremen."

For some, passions always did run strong, even at the expense of reason.

Knowledge of mistakes taught him long-term corrections. He had to be constantly aware of

consequences. If consequences were lost or concealed, lessons were lost. [...] As his humanity
slipped away, though, he found himself filled with more and more human concerns.

"The three legs of the agreement-tripod are desire, data and doubt. Accuracy and honesty have little
to do with it." [..]Desire brings the participants together. Data set the limits of their dialogue. Doubt
frames the questions.

Dependency fosters weakness!

What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking.
Things we do without thinkingthere's the real danger. Look at how long you walked across this desert
without thinking about your face mask."You could have warned me!" "And increased your
dependency."

What a marvelous thing to observe the explosive growth of awareness..

- "I still hate you!" she said.

- "You hate the predator's necessary cruelty."

"Curiosity has kept many people alive when all else failed”.

Most civilization is based on cowardice. It's so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down
the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You
fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You
teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.

A leader tries to perpetuate the conditions which demand his leadership.

Book V Heretics of Dune

"Doubt? Oh, no. But I do experience frustration. We work all of our lives for these highly refined
goals and in the end, what do we find? We find that many of the things to which we have dedicated
our lives came from petty decisions. They can be traced to desires for personal comfort or
convenience and had nothing at all to do with our high ideals. What really was at stake was some
worldly working agreement that satisfied the needs of those who could make the decisions."
Teg boiled it down to an essence: If only one person followed such guiding principles, this was a
better universe. It was never a question of justice. Justice required one to resort to law and that
could be a fickle mistress, subject always to the whims and prejudices of those who administered the
laws. No, it was a question of fairness, a concept that went much deeper. The people upon whom
judgment was passed must feel the fairness of it.

"It's safe to love land and places.”

Has not religion claimed a patent on creation for all of these millennia?

The powindah have constricted their awareness to its tightest purpose and that is their weakness. All
of them, Waff observed, had been restored to the central security of their faith. It had been easily
managed. No Masheikh shared the powindah stupidity that whined: "In thy infinite grace, God, why
me?" In one sentence, the powindah invoked infinity and denied it, never once observing their own
foolishness.

This Atreides Manifesto was the very kind of thing the masses of powindah would follow to their
doom.

Punishments and pain, which hung like an aura around the places forbidden to him, only made
Duncan exercise extreme caution when he broke the rules. [...] To him, Schwangyu's lesson was
direct: Refine his ability to move unobserved, unseen and unheard, leaving no spoor to betray his
passage.

Kipuna had the soft round features and fuzzy hair common among much of the Rakian priestly class,
but there was no fuzzy brain under that hair.

He felt as he always did just before battle: Empty of all false dreams. This was a failure. The talking
had failed and now came the contest of blood . . . unless he could prevail in some other way. Combat
these days was seldom a massive thing but death was there nonetheless. That represented a more
permanent kind of failure. If we cannot adjust our differences peacefully we are less than human.

Climbing from that cesspool, the population had employed only the basest pragmatism. If it works, it
is good.

The Lord made a world in six days "and on the seventh day He rested." Good for Him! Odrade
thought. We all should rest after great labors.

Love, damnable love, weakening love.

„We are taught to reject love. We can simulate it but each of us is capable of cutting it off in an
instant.”

- "We live longer and observe more," he said.

- "I don't think it's quite that simple. Some people never observe anything. Life just happens to
them. They get by on little more than a kind of dumb persistence, and they resist with anger
and resentment anything that might lift them out of that false serenity."

Never underestimate the power of doubts.

The basic rule is this: Never support weakness; always support strength.

The capacity for hatred was the capacity for its opposite.

Ahhhh, his pride shows itself, Taraza thought. Interesting. The implications of a moral structure
behind such pride must be explored.

... violence builds its own limits.

Care with details, that was Odrade's hallmark. [..] "Odrade's persona is exquisitely reflected in her
performance of duties." There was a joke in Chapter House: "Where does Odrade go when she's off
duty? She goes to work."

Buildings inevitably defined streets.

Animals always know when the herders arrive.

Logic could move just as blindly as any other faculty.

Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially
innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at
the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?

Sometimes, we make very responsible decisions for unconscious reasons.

Rot at the core always spreads outward.

Odrade, the obvious person to produce the Manifesto, could only achieve a deeper insight as she
wrote the document, but the words themselves were the ultimate barrier to revelation.

Patrin had never touched on the reasons for secrecy, but Teg made his own deductions. An unhappy
childhood. The need for his own secret place. Friends who were not friends but only people waiting
to sneer at him. None of those companions could be permitted to share such a wonder. It was his!
This was more than a place of lonely security. It had been Patrin's private token of victory.

"Reputation can be a beautiful weapon," Teg said. "It often spills less blood."

Lucilla did not feel diminished by the realization that she was a pawn.

That was knowledge bred and trained into every Reverend Mother of the Sisterhood. Even Teg knew
it. Not diminished, no. The thing around them had escalated in Lucilla's awareness. She felt awed by
Teg's words. How shallow had been her previous view of the forces within which they were
enmeshed. It was as though she had seen only the surface of a turbulent river and, from that, had
glimpsed the currents beneath. Now, however, she felt the flow all around her and a dismaying
realization. Pawns are expendable.

It reaffirmed her sense of being alive to see the work in front of her. Things to do. She was needed.
[..] Quietly, she regulated her breathing, insulated her senses from distraction and fell into the
between-state. Sleep did not come.
Taraza went through the well-remembered regimen to restore a sense of calm. She dared not make
momentous decisions in a frustrated mood.

Survival of self, of species, and of environment, these are what drive humans. You can observe how
the order of importance changes in a lifetime. What are the things of immediate concern at a given
age? Weather? The state of the digestion? Does she (or he) really care? All of those various hungers
that flesh can sense and hope to satisfy. What else could possibly matter?

... this freedom to respond in her own way within a new universe. Where had such toughness
originated? [..] She did not try to fool herself that this came from a decision never again to follow
another's moral guidance rather than her own. This inner stability upon which she now stationed
herself was not a pure morality. Not bravado, either. Those were never enough.

Lack of windows in an aboveground room conveyed a particular message. If humans occupied such a
room, it did not necessarily mean secrecy was the main goal. He had seen unmistakable signs in
scholastic settings that windowless schoolrooms were both a retreat from the exterior world and a
strong statement of dislike for children.

Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original,
becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.

A singsong of shouts filled the air as the merchants tried to attract buyers. Their voices had that end
of the workday lift -- a false brilliance composed of the hope that old dreams would be fulfilled, yet
colored by the knowledge that life would not change for them. It occurred to Lucilla that the people
of these streets pursued a fleeting dream, that the fulfillment they sought was not the thing itself but
a myth they had been conditioned to seek...

Intellectual understanding was one thing; experience was another.

When strangers meet, great allowance should be made for differences of custom and training.

Not quite at that degree of softness and conformity to bodily shape, of course. Too much comfort
could lure the sitter into relaxation. This room and its furnishings said: "Be comfortable here but
remain alert."

- "Don't want to spoil it with crowding."

- This idea had always amused Teg. You spread the word about such places but you did it
under the guise of keeping a secret.

It was not correct to call them depraved, he thought. Sometimes, the supremely rich did become
depraved. That came from believing that money (power) could buy anything and everything. And
why shouldn't they believe this? They saw it happening every day. It was easy to believe in absolutes.

Book VI Chapterhouse Dune

We tend to become like the worst in those we oppose.

At root, I am happy with myself. I do not mind being alone.

Face down in salty water, holding her breath as long as she could, she floated in a sea-washed now
that cleansed away woes. This was stress management reduced to its essence. A great calmness
flooded her. I float, therefore I am.

If you fitted yourself too tightly to one thing, other abilities atrophied. We become what we do.

Survival. The very bottom of the demand system is always survival.

I come here to create when my fears are greatest.

Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your own life. The object can be
stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and
play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play.
Nonplayers often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they
can create some of their own luck.

Odrade savored every bite. The other two plodded through the meal, spoon-tomouth, spoon-to-
mouth. Is this one of the reasons I am Mother Superior and they are not?

Truthsay... "There is no secret," Shoel had said. "It's training and hard work like anything else. You
exercise what they call 'petit perception,' the ability to detect very small variations in human
reactions.'

Bait! She thinks of you as something to capture larger game. How interesting. This one has a head
and uses it in spite of her violent nature. So that's how she came to power.

- "Then what do you depend on?"

- "My own internal reactions. I read myself, not the person in front of me. I always know a lie
because I want to turn my back on the liar."

"I think it's very wise, Shoel." Love speaking. She did not really know what he meant.

Corruption wears infinite disguises.

"They tell no casual lies. Truth serves them better."

Education is no substitute for intelligence. That elusive quality is defined only in part by puzzle-
solving ability. It is in the creation of new puzzles reflecting what your senses report that you round
out the definition.

Administration... Delegate heavily to only the same people and you fell into bureaucracy.

I cannot spend too much time on generalities nor on trivia.

"Strengthen your talents. Do not flow gently in the current. Swim! Use it or lose it." With a gasping
sensation of near panic, she realized she had barely retained her humanity, that she had been on the
point of losing it.

Some never participate. Life happens to them. They get by on little more than dumb persistence and
resist with anger or violence all things that might lift them out of resentment-filled illusions of
security.
The most terrifying things in the universe came from human minds.

To know a thing well, know its limits. Only when pushed beyond its tolerances will true nature be
seen. (The Amtal Rule) Do not depend only on theory if your life is at stake. (Bene Gesserit
Commentary).

'The ferocity we display to our foes is always tempered by the lesson we hope to teach.'

"The slave makes an awful master".

I have grown out of those things. They would be childish to me now.

Major flaws in government arise from a fear of making radical internal changes even though a need is
clearly seen.

Odrade stared at the pile. No matter how much she tried to delegate there was always this organized
residue that her councillors insisted only Mother Superior could handle.

Was that Bell attempting humor? All was not lost!

Mentats cultivated naivete. Thinking you knew something was a sure way to blind yourself.

Never follow a leader without asking your own questions. That was why moral conditioning of the
young took such high priority.

"Moral decisions are always easy to recognize," Odrade said. "They are where you abandon self-
interest."

That's beginning wisdom. There are many kinds of ignorance.. The basest is to follow your own
desires without examining them.

Humans are born with a susceptibility to that most persistent and debilitating disease of intellect:
self-deception.

Codes and manuals create patterned behavior. All patterned behavior tends to go unquestioned,
gathering destructive momentum.

Tam, close to her final departure from flesh, would be more sensitive to workings of myths.

Honored Matres were like barbarians in any age: blood instead of hostages. Strike with random
viciousness.

Spend energies on those who make you strong. Energy spent on weaklings drags you to doom.

Pride, that was what Odrade saw when she looked at her Sisters and their places. Dignity was only a
mask. No real humility.

A seabird alone and adapting. We adapt. We do indeed adapt.

Become too conservative and you were unprepared for surprises.

... logic is good for playing pyramid chess but often too slow for needs of survival.
If you loathe it, do it better. Use your loathing as guidance; home in on exactly what you need. .. I
must excel in this.

Bellonda would love the preeminent position and, for that reason, must never have it.

Death makes a prophet's voice louder. Martyrs are truly dangerous.liberty.

Going about its business before anyone can come out to investigate.

The most astonishing thing to Odrade whenever she saw one of these functional constructions was
that someone had taken a great deal of care in planning it. Intentional detail in everything although
you sometimes had to dig for it. Budget dictated reduced quality in many choices, endurance
preferred over luxury or eye appeal. Compromise and, like most compromise, satisfying no one.

Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know.

... no pity could be spared for those who never showed it to others.

There's no secret to balance. You just have to feel the waves.

She gave me then the ultimate gift of her love, a peaceful passing she had spoken of without fear or
tears, allaying thereby my own fears. What greater gift is there than to demonstrate you need not
fear death?