One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim.

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

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.

The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed.

Knowing where the trap is-- that's the first step in evading it.

the sleeper must awaken.

When I was writing Dune there was no room in my mind for concerns about the book's success or failure. I was concerned only with the writing. Six years of research had preceded the day I sat down to put the story together, and the interweaving of the many plot layers I had planned required a degree of concentration I had never before experienced.