Some Thoughts for Today..Or Not

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Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your life. The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck.

Darwi Odrade Chapterhouse: Dune

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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 corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.

Missionaria Protectiva Text QIV (decto) Chapterhouse: Dune

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Give me the judgment of balanced minds in preference to laws every time. Codes and manuals create patterned behavior. All patterned behavior tends to go unquestioned, gathering destructive momentum.

Darwi Odrade Chapterhouse: Dune

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Religion (emulation of adults by the child) encysts past mythologies: guesses, hidden assumptions of trust in the universe, pronouncements made in search of personal power, all mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always an unspoken commandment: Thou shalt not question! We break that commandment daily in the harnessing of human imagination to our deepest creativity.

Bene Gesserit Credo Chapterhouse: Dune

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Some never participate. Life happens to them. They get by on little more than dumb persistence and resist with anger or violence. all things that might life them out of resentment-filled illusions of security

Alma Mavis Taraza Chapterhouse: Dune

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Religion must be accepted as a source of energy. It can be directed for our purposes, but only within limits that experience reveals. He is the secret meaning of Free Will.

Missionaria Protectiva Protective Teaching Chapterhouse: Dune

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In my estimation, more misery has been created by reformers than by any other force in human history. Show me someone who says, "Something must be done!" and I will show you a head full of vicious intentions that have no other outlet. What we must strive for always is to find the natural flow and go with it.

Conversational Record, BG File GSXXMAT9 The Reverend Mother Taraza Heretics of Dune

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People always want something more than immediate joy or that deeper sense called happiness. This is one of the secrets by which we shape the fulfillment of our designs. The something more assumes amplified power with people who cannot give it a name or who (most often the case) do not even suspect its existence. Most people only react unconsciously to such hidden forces. Thus, we have only to call a calculated something more into existence, define it and give it shape, then people will follow.

Leadership Secrets of the Bene Gesserit Heretics of Dune

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It is said that there is nothing firm, nothing balanced, nothing durable in all the universe -- that nothing remains in its original state, that each day, each hour, each moment, there is change

Panoplia Propheticus of the Bene Gessert Dune: House Harkonnen

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Humans must never submit to animals.

Bene Gesserit Teaching Dune: House Harkonnen

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Many creatures bear the outward form of a man, but do not be fooled by appearances. Not all such life-forms can be considered human.

Bene Gesserit Azhar Book Dune: House Corrino

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These are illusions of popular history which a successful religion must promote: Evil men never prosper; only the brave deserve the fair; honesty is the best policy; actions speak louder than words; virtue always triumphs; a good deed is its own reward; any bad human can be reformed; religious talismans protect one from demon possession; only females understand the ancient mysteries; the rich are doomed to unhappiness.

From the Instruction Manual: Missionaria Protectiva Children of Dune

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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.

Politics as Repeat Phenomenon: Bene Gesserit Training Manual Children of Dune