It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains. The stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. — Mentat Piter De Vries in the 1984 Movie

My Take – When you are in control of yourself, you have the ability to do things instead of having things done to you.  Have confidence, not cockiness, think before acting, act with a purpose, and life will be much simpler.

Expect only what happens in the fight. That way you’ll never be surprised. — Duncan Idaho

My Take – If you think about self defense, you inevitably start thinking about scenarios.  The shady guy at the ATM, the home invasion, the robbery at the stop-n-stab, they all get played through in our minds.  But when we do this, we run the risk of having a script for defending ourselves and turning off our brains when it comes time to think “How am I going to survive this?”.  Be mindful of what can happen in the places you go, but don’t try to plan the unexpected.  Have your skills, your wits, and your common sense when something happens, and you have all the tools you can use.

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.  — Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam

Let us not rail about justice as long as we have arms and the freedom to use them. — Duke Leto Atreides

My Take – This reminds me of something I once heard someone say about the Romans:  The war is not over until one side considers itself beaten.  Duke Leto was telling his men that injustice could not truly be perpetrated upon them so long as they had the means to resist it and the will to do so.  It echoes a lot of the things our founding fathers said about how a free nation, armed and ready to defend itself, could never be truly subdued.  When a free people allow themselves to be disarmed and lose the will to fight, only then can they be considered conquered.

Try looking into that place where you dare not look! You’ll find me there, staring out at you! — Paul-Muad’Dib

My Take – A lot of the people I meet who are anti-gun or anti-self-defense express that they can’t imagine using force against another human being.  It is my goal to be in that little part of their reality as a good example when they decide to consider it.  And for the goblins who can’t imagine anyone defending themselves against their ‘revenue generating activities’, I plan to be there when they realize that their estimation of where they fit on the food chain is a bit skewed.

Science is made up of so many things that appear obvious after they are explained. — Pardot Kynes

My Take – I am always amazed at how simple most things are once I’ve had an “a-ha” moment.  Things that I used to fumble through or half understand become almost reflexive.

Hope clouds observation – Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam

My Take – When I try to figure out a problem, I sometimes find myself looking for evidence of the solution I prefer.  If you’re not dispassionate in appraising a situation and weighing the facts, your decision is almost guaranteed to be faulty.  Try to keep your prejudices, hopes, and pre-conceived notions out of it.

Edited to re-do a pre-scheduled post because somewhere along the way, the original went missing.

The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience. — Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam

My Take – For a long time, I just survived.  I got up, went to work, came home, went to bed.  Sometimes I read, sometimes I read whatever happened to be on TV, but I didn’t really have a life.  My life began when I opened the door and walked out to do something that wasn’t absolutely necessary for survival.  Life shouldn’t be a punishment.  If you can’t look back and say “That is what I do to enjoy life”, start branching out, because you’re missing something.

There is no escape — we pay for the violence of our ancestors.– Paul Muad’Dib

My Take – Has it ever occurred to anyone that we are still fighting the wars between England and France from the 1700’s?  Every war I’ve ever studied had its roots in the war before it, in a grand linked list of carnage and revenge.  The American Revolution was precipitated by the aftermath of the French and Indian War.  France went bankrupt at least in part because of its participation in our Revolution, which brought about the French Revolution and Napoleon.  The wars of Napoleon disrupted the balance in Europe and brought about the Franco-Prussian War and World War I.  World War I lead to the rise of Communism and World War II. Those two pestilences brought about the Cold War and most of the conflicts of the past 50 years.  Heck, the “War on Terror” we’re fighting now is nothing much more than us trying to deal with the aftermath of the collapse of European colonialism in the Mid-East, Asia, and Africa.

What we need to understand is that the decisions we make now are going to echo through the generations to come, and we should proceed with caution.

Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place. — Thufir Hawat

My Take – I’ve been a lot of places that I wish I could go back to, but when I get a chance to return to places like Monterey or Tombstone, they aren’t what I was expecting.  The people who made those beautiful places enjoyable to me aren’t there anymore.  It’s not the places we go or the things we do that make our lives interesting and enjoyable, it’s the friends that share those experiences with us that make them worthwhile.