Old Quotes Archive:

• "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." - The Stolen Journals

• 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 Litany Against Fear
  

• Muad'Dib could indeed see the Future, but you must understand the limits of this power. Think of sight. You have eyes, yet cannot see without light. If you are on the floor of a valley, you cannot see beyond your valley. Just so, Muad'Dib could not always choose to look across the mysterious terrain. He tells us that a single obscure decision of prophecy, perhaps the choice of one word over another, could change the entire aspect of the future. He tells us "The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door." And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning "That path leads ever down into stagnation." - From Arrakis Awakening by the Princess Irulan

• It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains. The stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. - The Mantra of the Mentat
  

• He was warrior and mystic, ogre and saint, the fox and the innocent, chivalrous, ruthless, less than a god, more than a man. There is no measuring Muad'Dib's motives by ordinary standards. In the moment of his triumph, he saw the death prepared for him, yet he accepted the treachery. Can you say he did this out of a sense of justice? Whose justice, then? Remember, we speak now of the Muad'Dib who ordered battle drums made from his enemies' skins, the Muad'Dib who denied the conventions of his ducal past with a wave of the hand, saying merely: "I am the Kwisatz Haderach. That is reason enough." - From Arrakis Awakening
  

• The gravest error a thinking person can make is to believe that one particular version of history is absolute fact. History is recorded by a series of observers, none of whom is impartial. The facts are distorted by sheer passage of time and - especially in the case of the Butlerian Jihad - thousands of years of humanity's dark ages, deliberate misrepresentations by religious sects, and the inevitable corruption that comes from an accumulation of careless mistakes. The wise person, then, views history as a set of lessons to be learned, choices and ramifications to be considered and discussed, and mistakes that should never again be made. - Princess Irulan, preface to the History of the Butlerian Jihad

• Do you wrestle with dreams?
• Do you contend with shadows?
• Do you move in a kind of sleep?
• Time has slipped away.
• Your life is stolen.
• You tarried with trifles.
• Victim of your folly. -Dirge for Jamis on the Funeral Plain, from Songs of Muad'Dib by the Princess Irulan

• When I was writing Dune there was no room in my mind for concerns about the book's success or failure. I was concerned only with the writing. Six years of research had preceded the day I sat down to put the story together, and the interweaving of the many plot layers I had planned required a degree of concentration I had never before experienced. It was to be a story exploring the myth of the Messiah. It was to produce another view of a human-occupied planet as an energy machine. It was to penetrate the interlocked workings of politics and economics. It was to be an examination of absolute prediction and its pitfalls. It was to have an awareness drug in it and tell what could happen through dependence on such a substance. Potable water was to be an analog for oil and for water itself, a substance whose supply diminishes each day. It was to be an ecological novel, then, with many overtones, as well as a story about people and their human concerns with human values, and I had to monitor each of these levels at every stage in the book. There wasn't room in my head to think about much else. -Foreword by Frank Herbert
  

• There is no such thing as the future. Humankind faces multiple possible futures, many of which hinge on seemingly inconsequential events. -The Muadru Chronicles

• Dune had to be made. But what kind of spaceships to use? Certainly not the degenerate and cold offspring of present day American automobiles and submarines, the very antithesis of art, usually seen in science fiction films, including 2001. No! I wanted magical entities, vibrating vehicles, like fish that swim and have their being in the mythological deeps of the surrounding ocean. The 'galactic' ships of North American technocracy are a mouse-gray insult to the divine, therefore delirious, chaos of the universe. I wanted jewels, machine-animals, soul-mechanisms. Sublime as snow crystals, myriad-faceted fly eyes, butterfly pinions. Not giant refrigerators, transistorised and riveted hulks; bloated with imperialism, pillage, arrogance and eunuchoid science. -Chriss Foss

• Let there be no doubts that I am the assemblage of our ancestors, the arena in which they exercise my moments. They are my cells and I am their body. This is the favrashi of which I speak, the soul, the collective unconscious, the source of archetypes, the repository of all trauma and joy. I am the choice of their awakening. My samhadi is their samhadi. Their experiences are mine! Their knowledge distilled is my inheritance. Those billions are my one. -The Stolen Journals

• Thoughts become weapons. Philosophies are distinct reasons for war. Good intentions are the most destructive arsenal of all. -Cogitor Kwyna

• "I will tell you how it will be. I will marry your daughter, the Princess Irulan. I will become the new Emperor of the Known Universe."
• "I am House Corrino. Only I sit on the throne!"
• "You and your House shall have a throne on Salusa Secundus, your prison world, and the training ground for your accursed Sardaukar. Either that, or you will die!" -Paul Atreides to the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV

• "You are transparent. I see many things. I see plans within plans." -Oberon

• I have come to believe that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.-The Stolen Journals

• The Ordos are mercenary. They care for nothing, save power and wealth. -Emperor: Battle for Dune