Цитаты из книги Дюна

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

By your belief in singularities, in granular absolutes, you deny movement, even the movement of evolution! While you cause a granular universe to persist in your awareness, you are blind to movement. When things change, your absolute universe vanishes, no longer accessible to your self-limiting perceptions. The universe has moved beyond you.

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?

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.

Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent mutual regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it.

Most discipline is hidden discipline, designed not to liberate but to limit. Do not ask Why? Be cautious with How? Why? leads inexorably to paradox. How? traps you in a universe of cause and effect. Both deny the infinite.

They think they keep the essence of the old ways. This is a failure of all museums. Something fades; it dries out of the exhibits and is gone. The people who administer the museum and the people who come to bend over the cases and stare few of them sense this missing thing. It drove the engine of life in earlier times. When the life is gone, it is gone.

Peace demands solutions, but we never reach living solutions; we only work toward them. A fixed solution is, by definition, a dead solution. The trouble with peace is that it tends to punish mistakes instead of rewarding brilliance.

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

All proofs inevitably lead to propositions which have no proof! All things are known because we want to believe in them.

Некоторые из моих предков так и не расстались с наивной верой в то, что они и только они держали в руках ключ к решению всех проблем человечества.

It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma.

If you believe certain words, you believe their hidden arguments. When you believe something is right or wrong, true or false, you believe the assumptions in the words which express the arguments. Such assumptions are often full of holes, but remain most precious to the convinced. –The Open-Ended Proof from, The Panoplia Prophetica

Irony often masks the inability to think beyond one's assumptions.

Our civilization could well die of indifference within it before succumbing to external attack.

do not believe in history, because history is impelled by whatever passes for money.

We've lost something vital, I tell you. When we lost it, we lost the ability to make good decisions. We fall upon decisions these days the way we fall upon an enemy – or wait and wait, which is a form of giving up, and we allow the decisions of others to move us.

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

The night is a tunnel, she thought, a hole into tomorrow…