The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.
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Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.
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The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it.
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Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. ...The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.
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Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaces by vague ritual.
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Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ablility to learn. The judgemental precedents of law function that way, littering your path with dead ends. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.
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I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. 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.
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All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptable. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.
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I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. 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.
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Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife--chopping off what's incomplete and saying: 'Now it's complete because it's ended here'.
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There is no escape - we pay for the violence of our ancestors.
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The mystery of life is not a problem to solve but a reality to experience.
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All governments eventually lean further and further towards aristocracy.
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A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.
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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.
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Truth is subject to too much analysis.
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If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.
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Seek freedom and become captive of your desires, seek discipline and find your liberty.
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Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent natural regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it.
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Humans live best when each has a place to stand, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things and what he may achieve. Destroy the place and you destroy the person.
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The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.
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Peace for any prolonged period of time is impossible. Humans have a natural thirst for chaos and war is the most readily available form of chaos.
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Blood is thicker than water, but politics are thicker than blood.
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Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?
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Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.
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Humans live best when each has his place, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things. Destroy the place and destroy the person.
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It is impossible to live in the past, difficult to live in the present and a waste to live in the future.
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Beaurocracy destroys initiative.
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Absolute power is the power to destroy.
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The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.
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