“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The drug’s dangerous, but it gives insight. When a Truthsayer’s gifted by the drug, she can look many places in her memory — in her body’s memory. We look down so many avenues of the past…but only feminine avenues. Yet, there’s a place where no Truthsayer can see. We are repelled by it, terrorized. It is said a man will come one day and find in the gift of the drug his inward eye. He will look where we cannot — into both feminine and masculine pasts. The one who can be many places at once: the Kwisatz Haderach. Many men have tried the drug…so many, but none has succeeded.”

“History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends. The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. This every sister of the Bene Gesserit knows. To begin your study of the life of Muad’Dib, then take care that you first place him in his time: born in the 57th year of the Padishah Emperor, Shaddam IV.”

“The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

You well know the weakness there! Shield your son too much, Jessica, and he’ll not grow strong enough to fulfill any destiny. Workingmen of all countries unite!”

“The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

“The working men have no country. We cannot take away from them what they have not got. There is probably no more terrible instance of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man — with human flesh. I must rule with eye and claw — as the hawk among lesser birds.”

“Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never persistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man. The theory of Communism may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”

“Do you wrestle with dreams?
Do you contend with shadows?
Do you move in a kind of sleep?
Time has slipped away.
Your life is stolen.
You tarried with trifles.
Victim of your folly.
But every class struggle is a political struggle.”

“A class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increase capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

“Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeosis epoch from all earlier ones. He who controls the spice controls the universe.”