Demagogues are so easy to identify. They gesture a lot and speak with pulpit rhythms, using words that ring of religious fervour and god-fearing sincerity. Sincerity with nothing behind it takes so much practice. The practice can always be detected. Repetition. Great attempts to keep your attention on words.

Religion, too, is a weapon. What manner of weapon is religion when it becomes the government?

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

Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed.

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

When you imagine mistakes, there can be no self-defense.

We never completely escape the teachers of our childhood nor any of the patterns that formed us.