Great Throughts Treasury

"I cannot lie to you any more than I could lie to myself, Paul said. I know this. Every man should have such an auditor."

"I cry for those not yet dead."

"I don’t think it’s quite that simple. Some people never observe anything, Life just happens to them. They get by on little more than a kind of dumb persistence, and they resist with anger and resentment anything that might lift them out of that false serenity."

"I didn't want to be different. I wanted to be able to laugh but I'm sister to an Emperor who's worshiped as a god. People fear me. I never wanted to be feared. I don't want to be part of history, I just want to be loved . . . and to love."

"I don't speak... I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own."

"I have been a stranger in a strange land, Halleck quoted. Paul stared at him, recognizing the quotation from the O.C. Bible, wondering: Does Gurney, too, wish an end to devious plots?"

"I have always felt a certain horror in political economists, since I heard one of them say that he feared the famine of 1848 in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good."

"I have come to believe that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will."

"I have said: Blow out the lamp! Day is here! And you keep saying: Give me a lamp so I can find the day."

"I have to remember the future."

"I know the evil of my ancestors because I am those people. The balance is delicate in the extreme. I know that few of you who read my words have ever thought about your ancestors this way. It has not occurred to you that your ancestors were survivors and that the survival itself sometimes involved savage decisions, a kind of wanton brutality which civilized humankind works very hard to suppress. What price will you pay for that suppression? Will you accept your own extinction?"

"I hear the doubt in your voice, Miles. Did he predict or did he create? Prescience can be deadly. The people who demand that the oracle predict for them really want to know next year's price on whalefur or something equally mundane. None of them wants an instant-by-instant prediction of his personal life."

"I observed you in pain, lad. Pain’s merely the axis of the test. Your mother’s told you about our ways of observing. I see the signs of her teaching in you. Our test is crisis and observation."

"I only believe in certain kinds of hell, she said, and again she was looking at him, the green eyes steady. To each his own, eh? You said it; I didn’t."

"I never thought it would be easy to serve God, she said. I just didn't think it would be this hard."

"I live in an apocalyptic dream. My steps fit into it so precisely that I fear most of all I will grow bored reliving the thing so exactly."

"I play the song to which you must dance. To you is left the freedom of improvisation. This improvisation is what you call free will."

"I point out to you, Marcus Claire Luyseyal, a lesson from past over-machined societies which you appear not to have learned. The devices themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines."

"I should like friendship with you... and trust. I should like that respect for each other which grows in the breast without demand for the huddlings of sex."

"I think what a joy it is to be alive, and I wonder if I'll ever leap inward to the root of this flesh and know myself as once I was. The root is there. Whether any act of mine can find it; that remains tangled in the future. But all things a man can do are mine. Any act of mine may do it."

"I’m something else… a freak."

"I stand in the sacred human presence. As I do now, so should you stand some day. I pray to your presence that this be so. Let the future remain uncertain for that is the canvas to receive our desires. Thus the human condition faces its perpetual tabula rasa. We possess no more than this moment where we dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence we share and create."

"If we deny emotion, we lose all touch with our internal universe."

"If we deny the need for thought, Moneo, as some do, we lose the powers of reflection; we cannot define what our senses report. If we deny the flesh, we unwheel the vehicle which bears us. But if we deny emotion, we lose all touch with our internal universe. It was emotions which I missed the most."

"If wishes were fishes we'd all cast nets."

"If you ask “Should we be in space?,” you ask a nonsense question. We are in space. We will be in space."

"If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order."

"If all those around you believe some particular thing, you will soon be tempted to share in that belief."

"If I always behave with propriety, no matter what it costs me to suppress my own desires, then that is the measure of me. Such is the essence of self-control."

"If there is a difference between what is said and what is done, only a fool believes what was said."

"If we define Futurism as an exploration beyond accepted limits, then the nature of limiting systems becomes the first object of exploration."

"If I sit for a while, then my impatience, crossness, frustration, are indeed annihilated, and my sense of humor returns."

"If you believe yourself sufficiently hungry, you will eat your own thoughts."

"If you focus your awareness only upon your own rightness, then you invite the forces of opposition to overwhelm you."

"If you need something to worship, then worship life - all life, every last crawling bit of it! We're all in this beauty together!"

"If you rely only on your eyes, your other senses weaken."

"If you want immortality, then deny form. Whatever has form has mortality. Beyond form is the formless, the immortal."

"Improvisation is sometimes the best, Baron."

"If you don't see the difference between regulation and law, both have the force of law. I see no difference. Laws convey the myth of enforced change. A bright new future will come because of this law or that one. Laws enforce the future. Regulations are believed to enforce the past. Believed? In each instance, action is illusory. Like appointing a committee to study a problem. The more people on the committee, the more preconceptions applied to the problem."

"If you live in bad faith, lies will appear to you like the truth."

"If you put away those who report accurately, you’ll keep only those who know what you want to hear. I can think of nothing more poisonous than to rot in the stink of your own reflections."

"If your weapons cost only a small fraction of the energy your enemy spent, you had a potent lever that could prevail against seemingly overwhelming odds. Prolong the conflict and you wasted enemy substance. Your foe toppled because control of production and workers was lost."

"In 1054, the patriarch of Constantinople and the pope excommunicated each other. That was the end of holiness for both churches."

"In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words. From witch doctor to priest to bureaucrat it is all the same. A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things, to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols are kept out of reach of common understanding--symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local interpretation of sanity. Symbol-secrecy of this form leads to the development of fragmented sub-languages, each being a signal that its users are accumulating some form of power."

"In my estimation, more misery has been created by reformers than by any other force in human history."

"In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are sometimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshy sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleetingly aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use its proper name: Temporary."

"In the beginning I was just as ready as anyone to fall into step, to seek out the guilty and to punish the sinners, even to become a leader. Nothing, I felt, would give me more gratification than riding the steed of yellow journalism into crusade, doing the book that would right the old wrongs. Reevaluation raised haunting questions.I now believe that evolution, or deevolution, never ends short of death, that no society has ever achieved an absolute pinnacle, that all humans are not created equal. In fact, I believe attempts to create some abstract equalization create a morass of injustices that rebound on the equalizers. Equal justice and equal opportunity are ideals we should seek, but we should recognize that humans administer the ideals and that humans do not have equal ability."

"In the Bene Gesserit schools where first names tended to slip away, roll call was by last name. Friends and acquaintances picked up the habit of using the roll-call name. They learned early that sharing secret or private names was an ancient device for ensnaring a person in affections."

"In the desert, especially at night, you encounter the dangers of hard thinking."

"In the Bene Gesserit Way, he opened his mind to Jacurutu, seeking to know nothing about it. Knowing was a barrier which prevented learning."