Do actions agree with words? There's your measure of reliability. Never confine yourself to the words.

She looked at patches of blackness. Black is a blind remembering, she thought.

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.

We tend to become like the worst in those we oppose.

When you think to take determination of your fate into your own hands, that is the moment you can be crushed. Be cautious.

Can you collect chaos? Not collecting, that is the ultimate gathering. What can you gather without gathering yourself.

These are illusions of popular history which successful religion must promote: Evil men never prosper; only the brave deserve the fair; honesty is the best policy; actions speak louder than words; virtue always triumpths; a good deed is its own rewards; any bad human can be reformed; religious talismans protect one from demon possession; only females understand the ancient mysteries; the rich are doomed to unhappiness