To come under siege was the inevitable fate of power.

We are generalists. You can't draw neat lines around planet-wide problems. Planetology is a cut-and-fit science.

What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking-there’s the real danger.

The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realize about an ecosystem is that it's a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche.

Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what's incomplete and saying: "Now it's complete because it's ended here."

In politics, the tripod is he most unstable of all structures. It's be bad enough without the complication of a feudal trade culture which turns its back on most science.

I don't worry about inspiration, or anything like that. It's a matter of just sitting down and working.