Children of Dune (Dune #3)

by Frank Herbert

“To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror; to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.”

Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class—whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.

If certainty is knowing absolutely an absolute future, then that’s only death disguised!