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It's your duty to seek out the best, Shevek. Don't let false egalitarianism ever trick you.

"How would you like to live billions upon billions of lives? There's a fabric of legends for you! Think of all those experiences, the wisdom they'd bring. But wisdom tempers love, doesn't it? And it puts a new shape on hate. How can you tell what's ruthless unless you've plumbed the depths of both cruelty and kindness? You should fear me, Mother. I am the Kwisatz Haderach."

"My mother's sick with longing for a planet she may never see, where water falls from the sky and plants grow so thickly you cannot walk between them."
"Water from the sky," Stilgar whispered.
In that instant, Paul saw how Stilgar had been transformed from the Fremen naib to a creature of the Lisan-al-Gaib, a receptacle for awe and obedience.
I have seen a friend become a worshipper, he thought.

How often is it that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.

When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual.

When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong - faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late.

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.

Paul felt that a vital moment had passed him, that he had missed an essential decision and was now caught up in his own myth. It was as though he rode within the wave of time, sometimes in its trough, sometimes on a crest-and all around him the other waves lifted and fell, revealing and then hiding what they bore on their surface.
Through it all, the wild jihad still loomed. It was like a promontory above the surf.

Paul, hearing these words, realized that he had plunged once more into the abyss... blind time. There was no past occupying the future in his mind... except... except.... he could still sense the green and black Atreides banner waving... somewhere ahead... still see the jihad’s bloody swords and fanatic legions.

It will not be, he told himself. I cannot let it be.

And I will make the rivers dry, and sell the land into the hand of the wicked: and I will make the land waste, and all that is therein, by the hand of strangers.

“My father once told me that respect for truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. 'Something cannot emerge from nothing,' he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable 'the truth' can be.”

Leto stared across the table, wondering why he waited. The tooth could end it all quickly. Still - it had been good, much of this life. He found himself remembering an anetanna kite updangling in the shell blue sky of Caladan, and Paul laughing with joy at the sight of it. And he remembered sunrise here on Arrakis - coloured strata of the Shield Wall mellowed by dust haze.

This Duke was concerned more over the men than he was over the spice. He risked his own life, and that of his son to save the men. He passed off the loss of a spice crawler with a gesture. The threat to men's lives had him in a rage. A leader such as that would command fanatic loyalty. He would be difficult to defeat.

Against his own will and all previous judgements, Kynes admitted to himself: I like this Duke.

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. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.

Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.

Snow-fields stretched down from the pass into the valleys of moraine. We stowed the wheels, uncapped the sledge-runners, put on our skis, and took off - down, north, onward, into that silent vastness of fire and ice that said in enormous letters of black and white DEATH, DEATH, written right across a continent.
The sledge pulled like a feather, and we laughed with joy.

Why can I never set my heart on a possible thing?

The First Mobile, if one is sent, must be warned that unless he is very self-assured, or senile, his pride will suffer. A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.

My landlady, a voluble man, arranged my journey into the East.

Whoever it is, tell them to go away.

"Are you going to inform the Cabinet?"
"No."
"Is that constitutional?"
"I don't know, and frankly at this stage, what does it matter? Either this will work and they will be too relieved afterwards to quibble, or it won't and they will be too busy trying on gas masks to care."

Genitivi provided the first low point, interrupting their celebrations as he slumped slowly in a corner, weeping.
"Lies. I have written lies."
"I found the Maker in everything. At the end of every discovery was His Glory."
He stared at the room, his eyes looking just as shattered. "The dust on these shelves is my career. How much did I ignore? How much is beneath, deliberately hidden by willful blindness?"

"Telling the Knight-Commander went well after all," I said dryly.
"It will," Rana said, and she sounded both thrilled and appalled by the rule-bending that had brought her here.

Trouble that talks back is the worst kind

I was at a party with one of those necromancers from down south a while ago. Five cups in, she went on about things 'past the Veil of our world,' neither demon nor spirit. Perhaps it wasn't the tipsy nonsense I assumed it to be.

Attempt no travel there.
Let the past guide you to a new direction.
And be well.

We have a great need for someone to take charge of the library.