'Try looking into that place where you dare not look! You'll find me there, staring out at you!'

To use raw power is to make yourself infinitely vulnerable to greater power

'He will not be found, yet all men will find him.'

Truth suffers from too much analysis.

Who asks for justice? We make our own justice. We make it here on Arrakis— win or die.

'My Uncle Malky always said the Lord Leto never responded to prayer. He said the Lord Leto looked on prayer as attempted coercion, a form of violence against the chosen god, telling the immortal what to do: Give me a miracle, God, or I won't believe in you!'

To accept a little death is worse than death itself.

Life — all life — is in the service of life

[Atrocity] is self-perpetuating upon itself - a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits future atrocities thus bred

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

Do not be quick to reveal judgment. Hidden judgment often is more potent. It can guide reactions whose effects are felt only when too late to divert them.

The problem of leadership is inevitably: Who will play God?

'And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life — we went soft, we lost our edge.'

'There was a man so wise, \ He jumped into \ A sandy place \ And burnt out both his eyes! \ And when he knew his eyes were gone, \ He offered no complaint. \ He summoned up a vision \ And made himself a saint. —Children's Verse'

The threat to men's lives had him in a rage. A leader such as that would command fanatic loyalty. He would be difficult to defeat.

'There existed no need on Caladan to build a physical paradise or a paradise of the mind — we could see the actuality all around us. And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life — we went soft, we lost our edge.'

'You [Duke Leto] there—a man snared by Destiny, a lonely figure with his light dimmed behind the glory of his son. Still, one must ask: What is the son but an extension of the father?'

the dice cannot read their own spots.

'It is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past.'

'Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, [and] inevitably fall short.'