(I quote "Dune" a lot, more than anything else. I repost quotes from two Mastodon accounts, so they are in the Meditations, but for convenience, I collected them here all as well.)

Quotes from Dune

"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."

"Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what's incomplete and saying: 'Now, it's complete because it's ended here.'"

"Thinking you know a thing is a sure way to blind yourself. Cultivate a sense of both, sophistication and naïveté about all things."

"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."

"Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your own life."

"Answers are a perilous grip on the universe. They can appear sensible yet explain nothing."

"The man without emotions is the one to fear."

"A ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel."

"Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind."

"Give as few orders as possible," his father had told him once long ago. "Once you've given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject."

"Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short."

"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."