Enter no conflict against fanatics unless you can defuse them. Oppose a religion with another religion only if your proofs (miracles) are irrefutable or if you can mesh in a way that the fanatics accept you as god-inspired.

Governments can be useful to the governed only so long as inherent tendencies toward tyranny are restrained.

Membership in a conspiracy, as in an army, frees people from the sense of personal responsibility.

"Tell me about the waters of your homeworld, Usul."

Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?

Consider the relationship between faith and power. Are they mutually exclusive when each depends upon the other?

I tell you we are a marvel and my memories leave no doubt of this.

Small souls who seek power over others first destroy the faith those others might have in themselves.

We can still remember the golden days before Heisenberg, who showed humans the walls enclosing our predestined arguments. The lives within me find this amusing.

The human body is composed of some seventy per cent water by weight. A dead man, surely, no longer requires that water.

Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife — chopping off what's incomplete and saying: "Now it's complete because it's ended here."

Battle? There's always a desire for breathing space motivating it somewhere.

You see, my climate demands a special attitude towards water. You are aware of water at all times. You waste nothing that contains moisture.

Some days it's melange; some days it's bitter dirt.

Never attempt to reason with people who know they are right!

"You, Paul Atreides, descendant of kings, son of a Duke, you must learn to rule. It's something none of your ancestors learned."

I remember deducing in that instant that my father secretly wished the Duke had been his son, and disliked the political necessities that made them enemies.

Corruption wears infinite disguises.

Knowledge, you see, has no uses without purpose, but purpose is what builds enclosing walls.

And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class

Given the right lever, you can move a planet.

It is your fate, forgetfulness. All of the old lessons of life, you lose and gain and lose and gain again.

The singular multiplicity of this universe draws my deepest attention. It is a thing of ultimate beauty.

No sweeteners will cloak some forms of bitterness. If it tastes bitter, spit it out.

He will not be found, yet all men will find him.

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

Any path which narrows future possibilities may become a lethal trap. Humans are not threading their way through a maze; they scan a vast horizon filled with unique opportunities.

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

No matter how exotic human civilization becomes, no matter the developments of life and society nor the complexity of the machine/human interface, there come interludes of lonely power when the course of humankind depends upon the relatively simple actions of single individuals

"I'm going to rub your faces in things you try to avoid. I don't find it strange that all you want to believe is only that which comforts you. How else do humans invent the traps which betray us into mediocrity? How else do we define cowardice?"

An offer is only as good as the real thing it buys.

Fortune passes everywhere

Sometimes, the supremely rich did become depraved. That came from believing that money could buy anything and everything.

I'm going to rub your faces in things you try to avoid. I don't find it strange that all you want to believe is only that which comforts you

And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life — we went soft, we lost our edge.

Thinking you know why you behave as you do gives you all sorts of excuses for extraordinary behavior.

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

One of the most terrible moments in a boy's life ... is when he discovers his father and mother are human beings who share a love that he can never quite taste. It's a loss, an awakening to the fact that the world is there and here and we are in it alone.

It is human to have your soul brought to a crisis you did not anticipate.

Hydraulic despotism: central control of an essential energy [...] Obey the central controlling power or the energy is shut off and you die!

Science is made up of so many things that appear obvious after they are explained.

"I was brought to this cell by your Priests. As with all Priests, you learned early to call the truth heresy."

Some believe that you must compromise integrity with a certain amount of dirty work before you can put genius to work. They say the compromise begins when you come out of the sanctus intending to realize your ideals.

The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed.

The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.

One thought remained to him. Leto saw it in formless light on rays of black: The day the flesh shapes and the flesh the day shapes.

Truth suffers from too much analysis.

You have read that Muad'Dib had no playmates his own age on Caladan. The dangers were too great.

Each man is a little war.

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.