I'd like to meet:
Intelligent, open-minded people.
Famous politicians.
Many, many deceased men and women.
Freemasons.
Illuminati.
Enlightened individuals.
Those that love nature, rather than exploit her.
Philosophers.
Mozart.
You.
Some of my favorite quotes:
"A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it, and flow with it." - The First Mentat Law
"What do you despise? By this you are truly known."
"The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realize about an ecosystem is that it's a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams the flow, order collapses. The untrained miss the collapse until too late. That's why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences."
"Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensations which tells you this is something you've always known."
"Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, 'I am not the kind of person I want to be.' It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied."
"It's easier to be terrified by an enemy you admire."
"The most persistent principles of the universe are accident and error."
"The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it."
"The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows - a wall against the wind. This is the willow's purpose."
"Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?"
"When God hath ordained a creature to die in a particular place, He causeth that creature's wants to direct him to that place."
"How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him."
"Try looking into that place where you dare not look! You'll find me there, staring out at you!"
"Every civilization must contend with an unconscious force which can block, betray or countermand almost any conscious intention of the collectivity."
"No matter how exotic human civilization becomes, no matter the developments of life and society nor the complexity of the machine/human interface, there always come interludes of lonely power when the course of humankind, depends upon the relatively simple actions of single individuals."
"The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: 'I feed on your energy.'"
"Do not be trapped by the need to achieve anything. This way, you achieve everything."
"There exists a limit to the force even the most powerful may apply without destroying themselves. Judging this limit is the true artistry of government. Misuse of power is the fatal sin. The law cannot be a tool of vengeance, never a hostage, nor a fortification against the martyrs it has created. You cannot threaten any individual and escape the consequences."
"f you need something to worship, then worship life — all life, every last crawling bit of it! We're all in this beauty together!"
"Often I must speak other than I think. That is called diplomacy."
"Power tends to isolate those who hold too much of it. Eventually, they lose touch with reality... and fall."
"You do not take from this universe. It grants you what it will."
"There are problems in this universe for which there are no answers. Nothing. Nothing can be done."
"When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual."
"The Universe is God's. It is one thing, a wholeness against which all separations may be identified. Transient life, even the self-aware and reasoning life which we call sentient, holds only fragile trusteeship on any portion of the wholeness."
"Either we abandon the long-honored Theory of Relativity, or we cease to believe that we can engage in continued accurate prediction of the future. Indeed, knowing the future raises a host of questions which cannot be answered under conventional assumptions unless one first projects an Observer outside of Time and, second, nullifies all movement. If you accept the Theory of Relativity, it can be shown that Time and the Observer must stand still in relationship to each or inaccuracies will intervene. This would seem to say that it is impossible to engage in accurate prediction of the future. How, then, do we explain the continued seeking after this visionary goal by respected scientists? How, then, do we explain Muad'Dib?"
"Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and predator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself — a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred."
"Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders."
"Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class — whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy."
"Above all else, the mentat must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The mentat-generalist, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in his universe. He must remain capable of saying: "There's no real mystery about this at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we'll correct that when we come to it." The mentat-generalist must understand that anything which we can identify as our universe is merely a part of larger phenomena. But the expert looks backward; he looks into the narrow standards of his own specialty. The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles, knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop. It is to the characteristics of change itself that the mentat-generalist must look. There can be no permanent catalogue of such change, no handbook or manual. You must look at it with as few preconceptions as possible, asking yourself: "Now what is this thing doing?"
"If you believe certain words, you believe their hidden arguments. When you believe something is right or wrong, true or false, you believe the assumptions in the words which express the arguments. Such assumptions are often full of holes, but remain most precious to the convinced."
"Peace demands solutions, but we never reach living solutions; we only work toward them. A fixed solution is, by definition, a dead solution. The trouble with peace is that it tends to punish mistakes instead of rewarding brilliance."
"Religion is the emulation of the adult by the child. Religion is the encystment of past beliefs: mythology, which is guesswork, the assumptions of trust in the universe, those pronouncements which men have made in search of personal power, all of it mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always the ultimate unspoken commandment is "Thou shalt not question!" But we question. We break that commandment as a matter of course. The work to which we have set ourselves is the liberating of the imagination, the harnessing of imagination to humankind's deepest sense of creativity."
"Any path that narrows future possibilities may become a lethal trap. Humans are not threading their way through a maze; they scan a vast horizon filled with unique opportunities. The narrowing viewpoint of the maze should appeal only to creatures with their noses buried in the sand."
"Is your religion real when it costs you nothing and carries no risk? Is your religion real when you fatten upon it? Is your religion real when you commit atrocities in its name? Whence comes your downward degeneration from the original revelation?"
"God's command comes; so seek not to hasten it. God's it is to show the way; and some do swerve from it."
"Some actions have an end but no beginning; some begin but do not end. It all depends upon where the observer is standing."
"The one-eyed view of our universe says you must not look far afield for problems. Such problems may never arrive. Instead, tend to the wolf within your fences. The packs ranging outside may not even exist."
"I'm going to rub your faces in things you try to avoid. I don't find it strange that all you want to believe is only that which comforts you. How else do humans invent the traps which betray us into mediocrity? How else do we define cowardice?"
"To stay awake all night adds another day to your life."
"It is said that the only fear we cannot correct is the fear of our own mistakes."
"Often there's no need to tear off an arm to remove a splinter."
"I have come to beleive that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will."
"Your Lord knows very well what is in your heart. Your soul suffices this day as a reckoner against you. I need no witnesses. You do not listen to your soul, but instead to your anger and your rage."
"It is one of the commonest of mistakes to
consider that the limit of our power of perception
is also the limit of all there is to perceive."
~CW Leadbeater
"The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions, but to destroy the capacity to form any." - Hannah Arendt
