Great Throughts Treasury

"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."

"Some problems are best solved with an optimistic approach. Optimism shines a light on alternatives that are otherwise not visible."

"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 lift them out of resentment-filled illusions of security."

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

"Silence is often the best thing to say."

"Since every individual is accountable ultimately to the self, formation of that self demands the utmost care and attention."

"Sometimes I wonder about Piter, the Baron said. I cause pain out of necessity, but he...I swear he takes a positive delight in it."

"Sometimes, the supremely rich did become depraved. That came from believing that money (power) could buy anything and everything. And why shouldn't they believe this? They saw it happening every day. It was easy to believe in absolutes."

"Something cannot emerge from nothing."

"Something flickered at the edges of conscious perception."

"Some say, Scytale said, that people cling to Imperial leadership because space is infinite. They feel lonely without a unifying symbol. For a lonely people, the Emperor is a definite place. They can turn toward him and say: 'See, there He is. He makes us one.' Perhaps religion serves the same purpose, m'Lord."

"Spend energies on those who make you strong. Energy spent on weaklings drags you to doom."

"Success, that was the danger. It had cost them an empire. If you waved your success around like a banner someone always wanted to cut you down. Envy!"

"Survival is staying alive one breath at a time."

"Spannungsbogen! Waff rolled the ancient word on his tongue: The span of the bow! How far back you draw the bow before releasing your arrow. This arrow would strike deep!"

"Survival is the ability to swim in strange currents."

"Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, a box where sweets compacted lie."

"Survival is the ability to swim in strange water."

"That is one of the Law's purposes, of course: to test the qualities of those who choose to employ it."

"Technology tends toward avoidance of risks by investors. Uncertainty is ruled out if possible. People generally prefer the predictable. Few recognize how destructive this can be, how it imposes severe limits on variability and thus makes whole populations fatally vulnerable to the shocking ways our universe can throw the dice."

"Sympathy for the enemy -- a weakness of police and armies alike. Most perilous are the unconscious sympathies directing you to preserve your enemy intact because the enemy is your justification for existence."

"That is the beginning of knowledge--the discovery of something we do not understand."

"The abyss remains. It is pregnant with all the things yet to be. Ah, what gentle violence!"

"The act of saying that things exist that cannot be described in words shakes a universe where words are the supreme belief."

"The assumption that a whole system can be made to work better through an assault on its conscious elements betrays a dangerous ignorance. This has often been the approach of those who call themselves scientists and technologists."

"The assumption that humans exist within an essentially impermanent universe, taken as an operational precept, demands that the intellect become a totally aware balancing instrument."

"The basic rule is this: Never support weakness; always support strength."

"The best contribution one can make to humanity is to improve oneself."

"The best prophets lead you up to the curtain and let you peer through for yourself."

"The constitution is social power mobilized and it has no conscience. It can crush the highest and the lowest, removing all dignity and individuality. It has an unstable balance point and no limitations."

"The Brain had begun its career in logics as a pragmatic atheist. Now doubts began to creep into its computations, and it classified doubt as an emotion."

"The current utopian ideal being touted by people as politically diverse (on the surface, but not underneath) as President Richard M. Nixon and Senator Edward M. Kennedy goes as follows — no deeds of passion allowed, no geniuses, no criminals, no imaginative creators of the new.Satisfaction may be gained only in carefully limited social interactions, in living off the great works of the past. There must be limits to any excitement. Drug yourself into a placid norm. Moderation is the key word…"

"The difference between a good administrator and a bad one is about five heartbeats. Good administrators make immediate choices. Acceptable choices? They can usually be made to work. A bad administrator, on the other hand, hesitates, diddles around, asks for committees, for research and reports. Eventually he acts in ways which create serious problems...A bad administrator is more concerned with reports than decisions. He wants the hard record he can display as an excuse for his errors.And good administrators? Oh, they depend on verbal orders. They never lie about what they've done if their verbal orders cause problems, and they surround themselves with people able to act wisely on verbal orders. Often the most important piece of information is that something has gone wrong. Bad administrators hide their mistakes until it's too late to make corrections.Men of decision.One of the hardest things for a tyrant to find is people who actually make decisions... Most bureaucracies before mine sought out and promoted people who avoided decisions."

"The difference between sentiment and being sentimental is the following: Sentiment is when a driver swerves out of the way to avoid hitting a rabbit on the road. Being sentimental is when the same driver, when swerving away from the rabbit, hits a pedestrian."

"The dice cannot read their own spots."

"The day hums sweetly when you have enough bees working for you."

"The failure of civilization can be detected by the gap between public and private morality. The wider the gap, the nearer the civilization to final dissolution"

"The flesh is passed. Eternity retracts what is hers. For a brief moment, our bodies are splashing water danced intoxicated by love of life and to ourselves, play with some fantastic ideas are finally subjected heads under the ax of time. How can we call it? I happened. I do not exist ... but I've happened."

"The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it."

"The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called 'spannungsbogen', which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing."

"The flesh surrenders itself, he thought. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not… yet, I occurred."

"The Guild Navigators, gifted with limited prescience, had made the fatal decision: they'd chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward to stagnation."

"The limit of the law is the limit of enforcement—the real limit of organized society."

"The gods do not limit men. Men limit men."

"The hearts of all men dwell in the same wilderness."

"The highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences"

"The man without emotions is the one to fear."

"The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture - it begins in the dignity with which we treat the dead"

"The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training."

"The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance."