Highly organized research is guaranteed to produce nothing new.

Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect all who seek it ... We should grant power over our affairs only to those who are reluctant to hold it and then only under conditions that increase that reluctance.

Religions often partake of the myth of progress that shields us from the terrors of an uncertain future.

War is behavior with roots in the single cell of the primeval seas. Eat whatever you touch or it will eat you.

The young reed dies so easily. Beginnings are times of great peril.

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.

Technology tends toward avoidance of risks by investors. Uncertainty is ruled out if possible. People generally prefer the predictable. Few recognize how destructive this can be, how it imposes severe limits on variability and thus makes whole populations fatally vulnerable to the shocking ways our universe can throw the dice.