Sisterhood of Dune (Schools of Dune, #1)

by Brian Herbert

It is easy to look backward and cast blame on others, but more difficult to gaze ahead and take responsibility for your own decisions and your own future.

It is a trivial thing to say you agree with certain beliefs, but a far greater challenge to have the conviction to act on them.

History may remember me with awe, terror, or hatred. I don’t care, so long as I am not forgotten.

Practice can take a student only so far. To truly advance, he must experience the real thing.

You can’t actually do ‘anything,’ but if you apply yourselves, you will discover strengths that others don’t have. You’ll surprise people who don’t expect it of you.” She lowered her voice. “And that is how you become powerful.”

The lines of the past can easily tangle and trip us. Whether or not we can see them, these threads of history bind us all.

There is no more optimistic person in the universe than the high-level graduate who is fresh from completing his studies and ready to fulfill far-reaching dreams.

“Knowledge is a benefit in and of itself.”

“The Butlerians are like the Luddites of ancient history, parochial thinkers on Old Earth in the nineteenth century of the old calendar. They were small-minded rioters in England who blamed their financial hardships on efficient machines that had been brought into local factories. Rampaging mobs destroyed the machines, expecting that would bring about a return to prosperity. It did not work.”

Technological progress cannot be held back forever.”

They were uneducated mobs easily swayed by a fiery speaker, good at creating scapegoats and not skilled at understanding. He had been convinced that knowledge was stronger than superstition, and rationality stronger than paranoia. It had been a naïve assumption.

Given enough time, they will forget … and will create us all over again.

Those who nourish themselves with hatred seldom realize they are starving.