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Indeed, it was the Bene Gesserit view that humans were life designed by evolution to create order.
Select from the past and match it against the present: learn consequences. That was the Bene Gesserit view of history,
auto-da-fé
But there are weapons you cannot hold in your hands. You can only hold them in your mind.”
We tend to become like the worst in those we oppose.
Her personal concept of sanity came from those times. The ability to balance on strange seas. The ability to maintain your deepest self despite unexpected waves.
Built into his machine, she thought. That said something about the way humans were fitted to the things they did. Lucilla sensed a weakening force in this thought. If you fitted yourself too tightly to one thing, other abilities atrophied. We become what we do.
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. —Darwi Odrade
All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that power is a magnet to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted. —Missionaria Protectiva, Text QIV (decto)
Memory should bring wisdom but it does not. It is how we order the memory and where we apply our knowledge.”
“Karl Marx made the mistake most jealous humans make: thinking everything he hated was evil and that he had the best correctives. He never faced the fact that jealousy and hatred themselves are the problem. The first correction has to be within you.”
Science must be innovative. It brings change. That’s why science and bureaucracy fight a constant war.”
“I tried to avoid complicating things,” Murbella said. Candour and honesty. “Trying to avoid complications often creates them.”
“Show me a completely smooth operation and I’ll show you someone who’s covering mistakes. Real boats rock.”
the perils of leadership in a species so anxious to be told what to do. How little they knew of what they created by their demands. Leaders made mistakes. And those mistakes, amplified by the numbers who followed without questioning, moved inevitably toward great disasters.
Politics: the art of appearing candid and completely open while concealing as much as possible.”
Unrocked boats bring the best banquets.
To know a thing well, know its limits. Only when pushed beyond its tolerances will true nature be seen.
Thinking you knew something was a sure way to blind yourself.
you cannot suppress the wild thing, the uniqueness that will occur among humans no matter how much we try to avoid it.”
Give me the judgment of balanced minds in preference to laws every time. Codes and manuals create patterned behaviour. All patterned behaviour tends to go unquestioned, gathering destructive momentum.
“There is an unconscious component to all human behaviour. Words try to mask this. It’s often better to watch what people do and ignore what they say. Disagreement between behaviour and words is extremely revealing. Action speaks.”
Those who aspired to making history dared not view the universe through a restricting lens.
“Honoured Matres have forgotten that clinging to any form of conservatism can be dangerous,” Odrade said. “Have we forgotten it as well?”
“Logic is blind and often knows only its own past.”
She knew so many things she was a walking display of ignorance and fears.
it. How much does she know about us ? She does not know that even Mother
