A major concept guides the Missionaria Protectiva: Purposeful instruction of the masses. This is firmly seated in our belief that the aim of argument should be to change the nature of truth. In such matters, we prefer the use of power rather than force.
- The Coda
Major flaws in government arise from a fear of making radical internal changes even though a need is clearly seen.
- Darwi Odrade
Time does not count itself. You only have to look at a circle and this is apparent.
- Leto II (The Tyrant)
Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. The judgmental precedents of law function that way, littering your path with dead ends. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.
- Mentat Fixe (adacto)
To know a thing well, know its limits. Only when pushed beyond its tolerances will true nature be seen. (The Amtal Rule) Do not depend only on theory if your life is at stake.
- Bene Gesserit Commentary
Some never participate. Life happens to them. They get by on little more than dumb persistence and resist with anger or violence all things that might life them out of resentment-filled illusions of security.
We do not teach history; we recreate the experience. We follow the chain of consequences — the tracks of the beast in its forest. Look behind our words and you see the broad sweep of social behavior that no historian has ever touched.
- Bene Gesserit Panoplia Propheticus
Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit. This is the fine point on which all the legal professions of history have based their job security.
- Bene Gesserit Coda
Religion (emulation of adults by the child) encysts past mythologies: guesses, hidden assumptions of trust in the universe, pronouncements made in search of personal power, all mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always an unspoken commandment: Thou shalt not question! We break that commandment daily in the harnessing of human imagination to our deepest creativity.
- Bene Gesserit Credo