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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b6d6118 | Deceit is a tool of statecraft," Irulan agreed. "There are limits to power, as those who put their hopes in a constitution always discover," Paul said." | deceit limits power statecraft tool | Frank Herbert | |
| a56cf1d | Moral decisions are always easy to recognize," Odrade said. "They are where you abandon self-interest." | Frank Herbert | ||
| 7076521 | governments lie to protect themselves and they make incredibly stupid decisions. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 99fbc1c | Once more the drama begins.' -- The Emperor Paul Muad'dib on his ascension to the Lion Throne. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 3c70f07 | Does the prophet see the future or does he see a line of weakness, a fault or cleavage that he may shatter with words or decisions as a diamond-cutter shatters his gem with a blow of a knife? -- | Frank Herbert | ||
| 5ba8e6b | Time could be made to serve the mind. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 7bf8e7e | One moment of incompetence can be fatal. | incompetence moment | Frank Herbert | |
| 11a36a0 | There's an internally recognized beauty of motion and balance on any man-healthy planet,' Kynes said. 'You see in this beauty a dynamic stabilizing effect essential to all life. It's aim is simple: to maintain and produce coordinated patterns of greater and greater diversity. Life improves the closed system's capacity to sustain life. Life - all life - is in the service of life. Necessary nutrients are made available to life by life in grea.. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 6baf0f7 | Time can also be a place, Moneo," Leto said. "Everything depends upon where you are standing, on where you look or what you hear. The measure of it is found in consciousness itself." -- | Frank Herbert | ||
| fcb64b5 | Vecina ljudi nije dovoljno jaka za pronalazenje slobode u sebi. | Frank Herbert | ||
| ffc85a5 | Most humans are not strong enough to find freedom within." Sister" | Frank Herbert | ||
| 13413e6 | Create or arouse such unbridled forces and you built carnal fantasies of enormous complexity. You could lead whole populations around by their desires, by their fantasy projections. | drives fantasy myth politics power projection urges | Frank Herbert | |
| bc77f6a | Flesh that had cried in ecstasy, eyes that had burned him with their desire, the voice that had charmed him because it played no tricks of subtle control--all gone, back into the water and the sand. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 3853ead | There is the difference between us," he said. "You are God embodied. You walk around within the greatest miracle of this universe, yet you refuse to touch or see or feel or believe in it." | Frank Herbert | ||
| 292c871 | Paul sensed his own tensions, decided to practice one of the mind-body lessons his mother had taught him. Three quick breaths triggered the responses: he fell into the floating awareness ... focusing the consciousness ... aortal dilation ... avoiding the unfocused mechanism of consciousness ... to be conscious by choice ... blood enriched and swift-flooding the overload regions ... one does not obtain food-safety-freedom by instinct alone ... | Frank Herbert | ||
| 5d8f131 | Madness in method, that is genius. | Frank Herbert | ||
| acf251b | The Golden Path demands it. And what is the Golden Path? you ask. It is the survival of humankind, nothing more nor less. We | Frank Herbert | ||
| 1c80a77 | Indeed, it was the Bene Gesserit view that humans were life designed by evolution to create order. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 956b9a4 | At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers. Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play. For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily.. | mythology prophecy religion science-fiction | Frank Herbert | |
| 6b3be4d | Democracy is susceptible to being led astray by having scapegoats paraded in front of the electorate. Get the rich, the greedy, the criminals, the stupid leader and so on ad nauseam. | democracy governance politics scapegoat vote | Frank Herbert | |
| 67a44bb | Power bases are very dangerous because they attract people who are truly insane, people who seek power only for the sake of power. | Frank Herbert | ||
| cf162d8 | Isn't it odd how we misunderstand the hidden unity of kindness and cruelty?" Jessica" | Frank Herbert | ||
| 81279bd | That is the beginning of knowledge--the discovery of something we do not understand. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 6ad7f56 | Educational bureaucracies dull a child's questing sensitivity." Odrade explaining. "The young must be damped down. Never let them know how good they can be. That brings change. Spend lots of committee time talking about how to deal with exceptional students. Don't spend any time dealing with how the conventional teacher feels threatened by emerging talents and squelches them because of a deep-seated desire to feel superior and safe in a saf.. | Frank Herbert | ||
| dee2097 | All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted. Missionaria Protectiva, Text QIV (decto) | Frank Herbert | ||
| 75618f6 | Taraza cleared her throat. "No need. Lucilla is one of our finest Imprinters. Each of you, of course, received the identical liberal conditioning to prepare you for this." There was something almost insulting in Taraza's casual tone and only the habits of long association put down Odrade's immediate resentment. It was partly that word "liberal," she realized. Atreides ancestors rose up in rebellion at the word. It was as though her accumula.. | Frank Herbert | ||
| f016d32 | The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed. We feel threatened by such demands. "I already know the important things!"we say. Then Changer comes" | Frank Herbert | ||
| 5f36e90 | Religion began as a female monopoly, wrested from them only after its social power became too dominant. Women were the first medical researchers and practitioners. There has never been any clear balance between the sexes because power goes with certain roles as it certainly goes with knowledge. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 80ac62a | Reality is what we make it. Or what is made for us by the companies we keep. It is our clay from which we fashion ourselves. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 916d293 | If I had a razor, I'd cut your throat - just to see what ran out of it." "Caterpillar blood," I said." | philip-marlowe regan-sternwood so-noir-it-hurts | Raymond Chandler | |
| 40d5364 | If it's wearing red, yellow, or both, it's a lama," he said. "Bow to it." "Isn't that a camel from South America?" | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 4ee957b | From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 6a7eba2 | At the entrance of this street, a Janissary was pinned to a wooden door by an eight-foot-long spear, which Jack looked on as proving that Yevgeny had passed by there recently. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 2cc1874 | Oh, god!" Carl Hollywood said, and collapsed into a big, tatty, overstuffed chair they kept backstage for such purposes." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 74df5c9 | It's when a society plunders its ability to look over the horizon and into the future in order to get short-term gain--sometimes illusory gain--that it begins a long slide nearly impossible to reverse. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| cab0883 | The suit's got a cervical airbag that blows up when you fall off the board, so you can bounce on your head. Besides, helmets feel weird. They say it doesn't affect your hearing, but it does. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 102a616 | Until he reached thirty, Randy felt bad about the fact that he was not socially deft. Now he doesn't give a damn. Pretty soon he'll probably start being proud of it. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 33b6b39 | Holding one of those things in your hands, cleaning the barrel and shoving the rounds into clips, really brings you face-to-face with what a desperate, last-ditch measure they really are. I mean, if it gets to the point where we are shooting at people and vice versa, then we have completely screwed up. So in the end, they only strengthened my interest in making sure we could do without them. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| ec227d9 | I am an Aleut." "Oh, I've never heard of that." "That's because we've been fucked over," the big scary Aleut says, "worse than any other people in history." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 3b5fb85 | Julia Bliss Flaherty, as Ivy now realized, was of the same stripe. Pinned down and obliged to justify herself, she would explain her actions in terms of some altruistic plan. And she might even believe it. But it wasn't that at all. She was like Ivy's grandmother. If you paid fealty to her, she would favor you, and your reputation and power would grow among all the others who did likewise. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 8b5d070 | It's ironic that Juanita has come into this place in a low-tech, black-and-white avatar. She was the one who figured out a way to make avatars show something close to real emotion. That is a fact Hiro has never forgotten, because she did most of her work when they were together, and whenever an avatar looks surprised or angry or passionate in the Metaverse, he sees an echo of himself or Juanita - - the Adam and Eve of the Metaverse. Makes i.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 5449b94 | I gotta say this," Scott says as the guy is sitting on his new bike, getting his swords adjusted, doing something incredibly unauthorized to the bios, "you look like one bad motherfucker." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 73cefb6 | But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 4c1e571 | Semper Fidelis Dawn star flares on disk of night I fall, sun rises | haiku | Neal Stephenson |