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Those who would repeat the past must control the teaching of history.
-- Bene Gesserit Coda
%
When I set out to lead humanity along my Golden Path I promised a lesson their
bones would remember. I know a profound pattern humans deny with words even
while their actions affirm it. They say they seek security and quiet,
conditions they call peace. Even as they speak, they create seeds of turmoil
and violence.
-- Leto II, the God Emperor
%
The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can
terrify. We do not want our ideas changed. We feel threatened by such
demands. "I already know the important things!" we say. Then Changer comes
and throws our old ideas away.
-- The Zensufi Master
%
Rules build up fortifications behind which small minds create satrapies.
A perilous state of affairs in the best of times, disastrous during crises.
-- Bene Gesserit Coda
%
We tend to become like the worst in those we oppose.
-- Bene Gesserit Coda
%
You cannot know history unless you know how leaders move with its currents.
Every leader requires outsiders to perpetuate his leadership. Examine my
career: I was leader and outsider. Do not assume I merely created a
Church-State. That was my function as leader and I copied historical models.
Barbaric arts of my time reveal me as outsider. Favorite poetry: epics.
Popular dramatic ideal: heroism. Dances: wildly abandoned.
Stimulants to make people sense what I took from them. What did I take?
The right to choose a role in history.
-- Leto II (The Tyrant): Vether Bebe Translation
%
You cannot manipulate a marionette with only one string.
-- The Zensunni Whip
%
Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your own life.
The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game
whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise,
you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play.
Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They
refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck.
-- Darwi Odrade
%
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.
-- Missionaria Protectiva, Text QIV (decto)
%
The writing of history is largely a process of diversion. Most historical
accounts distract attention from the secret influences behind great events.
-- The Bashar Teg
%
Corruption wears infinite disguises.
-- Tleilaxu Thu-zen
%
Education is no substitute for intelligence. That elusive quality is defined
only in part by puzzle-solving ability. It is in the creation of new puzzles
reflecting what your senses report that you round out the definition.
-- Mentat Text One (decto)
%
Many things we do naturally become difficult only when we try to make them
intellectual subjects. It is possible to know so much about a subject that
you become totally ignorant.
-- Mentat Text Two (dicto)
%
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
%
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
%
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
%
They say Mother Superior can disregard nothing -- a meaningless aphorism
until you grasp its other significance: I am the servant of all my Sisters.
They watch their servant with critical eyes. I cannot spend too much time on
generalities nor on trivia. Mother Superior must display insightful action
else a sense of disquiet penetrates to the farthest corners of our order.
-- Darwi Odrade
%
All states are abstractions.
-- Octun Politicus, BG Archives
%
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 lift
them out of resentment-filled illusions of security.
-- Alma Mavis Taraza
%
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
%
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)
%
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 have only to look at a circle and this is
apparent.
-- Leto II (The Tyrant)
%
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
%
The best art imitates life in a compelling way. If it imitates a dream, it
must be a dream of life. Otherwise, there is no place where we can connect.
Our plugs don't fit.
-- Darwi Odrade
%
Uproot your questions from their ground and the dangling roots will be seen.
More questions!
-- Mentat Zensufi
%
Humans are born with a susceptibility to that most persistent and debilitating
disease of intellect: self-deception. The best of all possible worlds and the
worst get their dramatic coloration from it. As nearly as we can determine,
there is no natural immunity. Constant alertness is required.
-- The Coda
%
Give me the judgment of balanced minds in preference to laws every time.
Codes and manuals create patterned behavior. All patterned behavior tends
to go unquestioned, gathering destructive momentum.
-- Darwi Odrade
%
No sweeteners will cloak some forms of bitterness.
If it tastes bitter, spit it out.
That's what our earliest ancestors did.
-- The Coda
%
Enter no conflict against fanatics unless you can defuse them.
Oppose a religion with another religion only if your proofs (miracles)
are irrefutable or if you can mesh in a way that the fanatics accept
you as god-inspired. This has long been the barrier to science assuming
a mantle of divine revelation. Science is so obviously manmade.
Fanatics (and many are fanatic on one subject or another) must know where
you stand, but more important, must recognize who whispers in your ear.
-- Missionaria Protectiva, Primary Teaching
%
We walk a delicate line, perpetuating Atreides (Siona) genes in our population
because that hides us from prescience. We carry the Kwisatz Haderach in that
bag! Willfulness created Muad'Dib. Prophets make predictions come true!
Will we ever again dare ignore our Tao sense and cater to a culture that hates
chance and begs for prophecy?
-- Archival Summary (adixto)
%
We witness a passing phase of eternity. Important things happen but some
people never notice. Accidents intervene. You are not present at episodes.
You depend on reports. And people shutter their minds. What good are reports?
History in a news account? Preselected at an editorial conference, digested
and excreted by prejudice? Accounts you need seldom come from those who make
history. Diaries, memoirs and autobiographies are subjective forms of special
pleading. Archives are crammed with such suspect stuff.
-- Darwi Odrade
%
Spend energies on those who make you strong. Energy spent on weaklings drags
you to doom. (HM rule) Bene Gesserit Commentary: Who judges?
-- The Dortujla Record
%
Ish yara al-ahdab hadbat-u.
(A hunchback does not see his own hunch. -- Folk Saying.)
Bene Gesserit Commentary: The hunch may be seen with
the aid of mirrors but mirrors may show the whole being.
-- The Bashar Teg
%
Religion must be accepted as a source of energy. It can be directed
for our purposes, but only within limits that experience reveals.
Here is the secret meaning of Free Will.
-- Missionaria Protectiva, Primary Teaching
%
Our household god is this thing we carry forward generation after generation:
our message for humankind if it matures. The closest thing we have to a
household goddess is a failed Reverend Mother -- Chenoeh there in her niche.
-- Darwi Odrade
%
When are the witches to be trusted? Never! The dark side of the magic
universe belongs to the Bene Gesserit and we must reject them.
-- Tylwyth Waff, Master of Masters
%
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires.
Seek discipline and find your liberty.
-- The Coda
%
Making workable choices occurs in a crucible of informative mistakes.
Thus Intelligence accepts fallibility. And when absolute (infallible)
choices are not known, Intelligence takes chances with limited data in
an arena where mistakes are not only possible but also necessary.
-- Darwi Odrade
%
Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know.
-- Zensunni koan
%
Answers are a perilous grip on the universe. They can appear sensible yet
explain nothing.
-- The Zensunni Whip
%
Battle? There's always a desire for breathing space motivating it somewhere.
-- The Bashar Teg
%
Do not be quick to reveal judgment. Hidden judgment often is more potent.
It can guide reactions whose effects are felt only when too late to divert them.
-- Bene Gesserit Advice to Postulants
%
Looked at one way, the universe is Brownian movement, nothing predictable at
the elemental level. Muad'Dib and his Tyrant son closed the cloud chamber
where movement occurred.
-- Stories from Gammu
%
What do Holy Accidents teach? Be resilient. Be strong.
Be ready for change, for the new. Gather many experiences
and judge them by the steadfast nature of our faith.
-- Tleilaxu Doctrine
%
When you think to take determination of your fate into your own hands,
that is the moment you can be crushed. Be cautious. Allow for surprises.
When we create, there are always other forces at work.
-- Darwi Odrade
%
There's no secret to balance. You just have to feel the waves.
-- Darwi Odrade
%
Paired opposites define your longings and those longings imprison you.
-- The Zensunni Whip
%

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Muad'Dib's teachings have become the playground of scholastics, of the
superstitious and the corrupt. He taught a balanced way of life, a philosophy
with which a human can meet problems arising from an ever-changing universe.
He said humankind is still evolving, in a process which will never end.
He said this evolution moves on changing principles which are known only
to eternity. How can corrupted reasoning play with such an essence?
-- Words of the Mentat Duncan Idaho
%
CHALLENGE: "Have you seen The Preacher?"
RESPONSE: "I have seen a sandworm."
CHALLENGE: "What about that sandworm?"
RESPONSE: "It gives us the air we breathe."
CHALLENGE: "Then why do we destroy its land?"
RESPONSE: "Because Shai-Hulud [sandworm deified] orders it."
-- Riddles of Arrakis by Harq al-Ada
%
The sietch at the desert's rim
Was Liet's, was Kynes's,
Was Stilgar's, was Muad'Dib's
And, once more, was Stilgar's.
The Naibs one by one sleep in the sand,
But the sietch endures.
-- from a Fremen song
%
melange (me'-lange also ma,lanj) n-s, origin uncertain (thought to derive from
ancient Terran Franzh): a. mixture of spices; b. spice of Arrakis (Dune) with
geriatric properties first noted by Yanshuph Ashkoko, royal chemist in reign of
Shakkad the Wise; Arrakeen melange, found only in deepest desert sands of
Arrakis, linked to prophetic visions of Paul Muad'Dib (Atreides), first Fremen
Mahdi; also employed by Spacing Guild Navigators and the Bene Gesserit.
-- Dictionary Royal fifth edition
%
The Fremen must return to his original faith, to his genius in forming human
communities; he must return to the past, where that lesson of survival was
learned in the struggle with Arrakis. The only business of the Fremen should be
that of opening his soul to the inner teachings. The worlds of the Imperium,
the Landsraad and the CHOAM Confederacy have no message to give him.
They will only rob him of his soul.
-- The Preacher at Arrakeen
%
I give you the desert chameleon, whose ability to blend itself into the
background tells you all you need to know about the roots of ecology
and the foundations of a personal identity.
-- Book of Diatribes from the Hayt Chronicle
%
The Universe is God's. It is one thing, a wholeness against which all
separations may be identified. Transient life, even that self-aware and
reasoning life which we call sentient, holds only fragile trusteeship on any
portion of the wholeness.
-- Commentaries from the C.E.T. (Commission of Ecumenical Translators)
%
And I beheld another beast coming up out of the sand; and he had two horns like
a lamb, but his mouth was fanged and fiery as the dragon and his body shimmered
and burned with great heat while it did hiss like the serpent.
-- Revised Orange Catholic Bible
%
It is commonly reported, my dear Georad, that there exists great natural
virtue in the melange experience. Perhaps this is true. There remain within
me, however, profound doubts that every use of melange always brings virtue.
Me seems that certain persons have corrupted the use of melange in defiance
of God. In the words of the Ecumenon, they have disfigured the soul.
They skim the surface of melange and believe thereby to attain grace.
They deride their fellows, do great harm to godliness, and they distort
the meaning of this abundant gift maliciously, surely a mutilation beyond
the power of man to restore. To be truly at one with the virtue of the spice,
uncorrupted in all ways, full of goodly honor, a man must permit his deeds and
his words to agree. When your actions describe a system of evil consequences,
you should be judged by those consequences and not by your explanations.
It is thus that we should judge Muad'Dib.
-- The Pedant Heresy
%
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?
-- Lectures on Prescience by Harq al-Ada
%
I hear the wind blowing across the desert and I see the moons of a winter night
rising tike great ships in the void. To them I make my vow: I will be resolute
and make an art of government; I will balance my inherited past and become a
perfect storehouse of my relic memories. And I will be known for kindliness
more than for knowledge. My face will shine down the corridors of time for as
long as humans exist.
-- Leto's Vow, After Harq al-Ada
%
These are illusions of popular history which a successful religion must
promote: Evil men never prosper; only the brave deserve the fair; honesty is
the best policy; actions speak louder than words; virtue always triumphs; a
good deed is its own reward; any bad human can be reformed; religious talismans
protect one from demon possession; only females understand the ancient
mysteries; the rich are doomed to unhappiness . . .
-- From the Instruction Manual: Missionaria Protectiva
%
A sophisticated human can become primitive. What this really means is that the
human's way of life changes. Old values change, become linked to the landscape
with its plants and animals. This new existence requires a working knowledge of
those multiplex and cross-linked events usually referred to as nature.
It requires a measure of respect for the inertial power within such natural
systems. When a human gains this working knowledge and respect, that is called
"being primitive." The converse, of course, is equally true: the primitive can
become sophisticated, but not without accepting dreadful psychological damage.
-- The Leto Commentary, After Harq al-Ada
%
This was Muad'Dib's achievement: He saw the subliminal reservoir of each
individual as an unconscious bank of memories going back to the primal cell of
our common genesis. Each of us, he said, can measure out his distance from that
common origin. Seeing this and telling of it, he made the audacious leap of
decision. Muad'Dib set himself the task of integrating genetic memory into
ongoing evaluation. Thus did he break through Time's veils, making a single
thing of the future and the past. That was Muad'Dib's creation embodied in his
son and his daughter.
-- Testament of Arrakis by Harq al-Ada
%
And he saw a vision of armor. The armor was not his own skin; it was stronger
than plasteel. Nothing penetrated his armor -- not knife or poison or sand, not
the dust of the desert or its desiccating heat. In his right hand he carried
the power to make the Coriolis storm, to shake the earth and erode it into
nothing. His eyes were fixed upon the Golden Path and in his left hand he
carried the scepter of absolute mastery. And beyond the Golden Path, his eyes
looked into eternity which he knew to be the food of his soul and of his
everlasting flesh.
-- Heighia, My Brother's Dream from The Book of Ghanima
%
Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and perpetrator 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.
-- The Apocrypha of Muad'Dib
%
I will not argue with the Fremen claims that they are divinely inspired to
transmit a religious revelation, it is their concurrent claim to ideological
revelation which inspires me to shower them with derision. Of course, they make
the dual claim in the hope that it will strengthen their mandarinate and help
them to endure in a universe which finds them increasingly oppressive.
It is in the name of all those oppressed people that I warn the Fremen:
short-term expediency always fails in the long term.
-- The Preacher at Arrakeen
%
The life of a single human, as the life of a family or an entire people,
persists as memory. My people must come to see this as part of their maturing
process. They are people as organism, and in this persistent memory they store
more and more experiences in a subliminal reservoir. Humankind hopes to call
upon this material if it is needed for a changing universe. But much that is
stored can be lost in that chance play of accident which we call "fate."
Much may not be integrated into evolutionary relationships, and thus may not
be evaluated and keyed into activity by those ongoing environmental changes
which inflict themselves upon flesh. The species can forget! This is the
special value of the Kwisatz Haderach which the Bene Gesserits never suspected:
the Kwisatz Haderach cannot forget.
-- The Book of Leto, After Harq al-Ada
%
A Fremen dies when he is too long from the desert; this we call "the water
sickness."
-- Stilgar, the Commentaries
%
You have loved Caladan
And lamented its lost host --
But pain discovers
New lovers cannot erase
Those forever ghost.
-- Refrain from The Habbanya Lament
%
The assumption that humans exist within an essentially impermanent universe,
taken as an operational precept, demands that the intellect become a totally
aware balancing instrument. But the intellect cannot react thus without
involving the entire organism. Such an organism may be recognized by its
burning, driving behavior. And thus it is with a society treated as organism.
But here we encounter an old inertia. Societies move to the goading of ancient,
reactive impulses. They demand permanence. Any attempt to display the universe
of impermanence arouses rejection patterns, fear, anger, and despair. Then how
do we explain the acceptance of prescience? Simply: the giver of prescient
visions, because he speaks of an absolute (permanent) realization, may be
greeted with joy by humankind even while predicting the most dire events.
-- The Book of Leto, After Harq al-Ada
%
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.
-- Law and Governance, The Spacing Guild Manual
%
This is the fallacy of power: ultimately it is effective only in an absolute,
a limited universe. But the basic lesson of our relativistic universe is that
things change. Any power must always meet a greater power. Paul Muad'Dib taught
this lesson to the Sardaukar on the Plains of Arrakeen. His descendants have
yet to learn the lesson for themselves.
-- The Preacher at Arrakeen
%
When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to
your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because
that is according to my principles.
-- Words of an ancient philosopher (Attributed by Harq al-Ada to one Louis
Veuillot)
%
You Bene Gesserit call your activity of the Panoplia Prophetica a "Science of
Religion." Very well. I, a seeker after another kind of scientist, find this an
appropriate definition. You do, indeed, build your own myths, but so do all
societies. You I must warn, however. You are behaving as so many other
misguided scientists have behaved. Your actions reveal that you wish to take
something out of [away from] life. It is time you were reminded of that which
you so often profess: One cannot have a single thing without its opposite.
-- The Preacher at Arrakeen: A Message to the Sisterhood
%
The universe is just there; that's the only way a Fedaykin can view it and
remain the master of his senses. The universe neither threatens nor promises.
It holds things beyond our sway: the fall of a meteor, the eruption of a
spiceblow, growing old and dying. These are the realities of this universe and
they must be faced regardless of how you feel about them. You cannot fend off
such realities with words. They will come at you in their own wordless way and
then, then you will understand what is meant by "life and death."
Understanding this, you will be filled with joy.
-- Muad'Dib to his Fedaykin
%
It is said of Muad'Dib that once when he saw a weed trying to grow
between two rocks, he moved one of the rocks. Later, when the weed
was seen to be flourishing, he covered it with the remaining rock.
"That was its fate," he explained.
-- The Commentaries
%
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.
-- Politics as Repeat Phenomenon: Bene Gesserit Training Manual
%
In this age when the means of human transport include devices which can span
the deeps of space in transtime, and other devices which can carry men swiftly
over virtually impassable planetary surfaces, it seems odd to think of
attempting long journeys afoot. Yet this remains a primary means of travel on
Arrakis, a fact attributed partly to preference and partly to the brutal
treatment which this planet reserves for anything mechanical. In the strictures
of Arrakis, human flesh remains the most durable and reliable resource for the
Hajj. Perhaps it is the implicit awareness of this fact which makes Arrakis the
ultimate mirror of the soul.
-- Handbook of the Hajj
%
In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain
and maintain power through the use of words. From witch doctor to priest to
bureaucrat it is all the same. A governed populace must be conditioned to
accept power-words as actual things, to confuse the symbolized system with the
tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain
symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding -- symbols such as
those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local
interpretation of sanity. Symbol-secrecy of this form leads to the development
of fragmented sub-languages, each being a signal that its users are
accumulating some form of power. With this insight into a power process, our
Imperial Security Force must be ever alert to the formation of sub-languages.
-- Lecture to the Arrakeen War College by, The Princess Irulan
%
The password was given to me by a man who died in the dungeons of Arrakeen.
You see, that is where I got this ring in the shape of a tortoise.
It was in the suk outside the city where I was hidden by the rebels.
The password? Oh, that has been changed many times since then.
It was "Persistence." And the countersign was "Tortoise."
It got me out of there alive. That's why I bought this ring: a reminder.
-- Tagir Mohandis: Conversations with a Friend
%
I saw his blood and a piece of his robe which had been ripped by sharp claws.
His sister reports vividly of the tigers, the sureness of their attack.
We have questioned one of the plotters, and others are dead or in custody.
Everything points to a Corrino plot. A Truthsayer has attested to this testimony.
-- Stilgar's Report to the Landsraad Commission
%
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 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?"
-- The Mentat Handbook
%
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.
-- The Azhar Book; Shamra I:4
%
Only in the realm of mathematics can you understand Muad'Dib's precise view of
the future. Thus: first, we postulate any number of point-dimensions in space.
(This is the classic n-fold extended aggregate of n dimensions.) With this
framework, Time as commonly understood becomes an aggregate of one-dimensional
properties. Applying this to the Muad'Dib phenomenon, we find that we either
are confronted by new properties of Time or (by reduction through the infinity
calculus) we are dealing with separate systems which contain n body properties.
For Muad'Dib, we assume the latter. As demonstrated by the reduction, the point
dimensions of the n-fold can only have separate existence within different
frameworks of Time. Separate dimensions of Time are thus demonstrated to
coexist. This being the inescapable case, Muad'Dib's predictions required that
he perceive the n-fold not as extended aggregate but as an operation within a
single framework. In effect, he froze his universe into that one framework
which was his view of Time.
-- Palimbasha: Lectures at Sietch Tabr
%
We can still remember the golden days before Heisenberg, who showed humans
the walls enclosing our predestined arguments. The lives within me find this
amusing. Knowledge, you see, has no uses without purpose, but purpose is what
builds enclosing walls.
-- Leto Atreides II, His Voice
%
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.
-- The Open-Ended Proof from, The Panoplia Prophetica
%
Because of the one-pointed Time awareness in which the conventional mind
remains immersed, humans tend to think of everything in a sequential,
word-oriented framework. This mental trap produces very short-term concepts of
effectiveness and consequences, a condition of constant, unplanned response to
crises.
-- Liet-Kynes, The Arrakis Workbook
%
You will learn the integrated communication methods as you complete the next
step in your mentat education. This is a gestalten function which will overlay
data paths in your awareness, resolving complexities and masses of input from
the mentat index-catalogue techniques which you already have mastered. Your
initial problem will be the breaking tensions arising from the divergent
assembly of minutiae/data on specialized subjects. Be warned. Without mentat
overlay integration, you can be immersed in the Babel Problem, which is the
label we give to the omnipresent dangers of achieving wrong combinations from
accurate information.
-- The Mentat Handbook
%
O Paul, thou Muad'Dib,
Mahdi of all men,
Thy breath exhaled
Sent forth the hurricane.
-- Songs of Muad'Dib
%
Many forces sought control of the Atreides twins and, when the death of
Leto was announced, this movement of plot and counterplot was amplified.
Note the relative motivations: the Sisterhood feared Alia, an adult Abomination,
but still wanted those genetic characteristics carried by the Atreides.
The Church hierarchy of Auqaf and Hajj saw only the power implicit in control of
Muad'Dib's heir. CHOAM wanted a doorway to the wealth of Dune. Farad'n and his
Sardaukar sought a return to glory for House Corrino. The Spacing Guild feared
the equation Arrakis = melange; without the spice they could not navigate.
Jessica wished to repair what her disobedience to the Bene Gesserit had created.
few thought to ask the twins what their plans might be, until it was too late.
-- The Book of Kreos
%
There is no guilt or innocence in you. All of that is past. Guilt belabors the
dead and I am not the Iron Hammer. You multitude of the dead are merely people
who have done certain things, and the memory of those things illuminates my path.
-- Leto II to His Memory-Lives, After Harq al-Ada
%
Humankind periodically goes through a speedup of its affairs, thereby
experiencing the race between the renewable vitality of the living and the
beckoning vitiation of decadence. In this periodic race, any pause becomes
luxury. Only then can one reflect that all is permitted; all is possible.
-- The Apocrypha of Muad'Dib
%
Natural selection has been described as an environment selectively screening
for those who will have progeny. Where humans are concerned, though, this is an
extremely limiting viewpoint. Reproduction by sex tends toward experiment and
innovation. It raises many questions, including the ancient one about whether
environment is a selective agent after the variation occurs, or whether
environment plays a pre-selective role in determining the variations which it
screens. Dune did not realty answer those questions: it merely raised new
questions which Leto and the Sisterhood may attempt to answer over the next
five hundred generations.
-- The Dune Catastrophe, After Harq al-Ada
%
One small bird has called thee
From a beak streaked crimson.
It cried once over Sietch Tabr
And thou went forth unto Funeral Plain.
-- Lament for Leto II
%
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.
-- The Words of My Father: an account of Muad'Dib reconstructed by Harq al-Ada
%
This rocky shrine to the skull of a ruler grants no prayers. It has become
the grave of lamentations. Only the wind hears the voice of this place.
The cries of night creatures and the passing wonder of two moons, all say his
day has ended. No more supplicants come. The visitors have gone from the feast.
How bare the pathway down this mountain.
-- Lines at the Shrine of an Atreides Duke, Anon.
%
There exist obvious higher-order influences in any planetary system. This is
often demonstrated by introducing terraform life onto newly discovered planets.
In all such cases, the life in similar zones develops striking similarities of
adaptive form. This form signifies much more than shape; it connotes a survival
organization and a relationship of such organizations. The human quest for this
interdependent order and our niche within it represents a profound necessity.
The quest can, however, be perverted into a conservative grip on sameness.
This has always proved deadly for the entire system.
-- The Dune Catastrophe, After Harq al-Ada
%
What you of the CHOAM directorate seem unable to understand is that you seldom
find real loyalties in commerce. When did you last hear of a clerk giving his
life for the company? Perhaps your deficiency rests in the false assumption
that you can order men to think and cooperate. This has been a failure of
everything from religions to general staffs throughout history. General staffs
have a long record of destroying their own nations. As to religions, I
recommend a rereading of Thomas Aquinas. As to you of CHOAM, what nonsense you
believe! Men must want to do things out of their own innermost drives. People,
not commercial organizations or chains of command, are what make great
civilizations work. Every civilization depends upon the quality of the
individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them,
suppress their urge to greatness -- they cannot work and their civilization
collapses.
-- A letter to CHOAM, Attributed to The Preacher
%
The future of prescience cannot always be locked into the rules of the past.
The threads of existence tangle according to many unknown laws. Prescient
future insists on its own rules. It will not conform to the ordering of the
Zensunni nor to the ordering of science. Prescience builds a relative
integrity. It demands the work of this instant, always warning that you
cannot weave every thread into the fabric of the past.
-- Kalima: The Words of Muad'Dib, The Shuloch Commentary
%
Fremen speech implies great concision, a precise sense of expression. It is
immersed in the illusion of absolutes. Its assumptions are a fertile ground for
absolutist religions. Furthermore, Fremen are fond of moralizing. They confront
the terrifying instability of all things with institutionalized statements.
They say: "We know there is no summa of all attainable knowledge; that is the
preserve of God. But whatever men can learn, men can contain." Out of this
knife-edged approach to the universe they carve a fantastic belief in signs and
omens and in their own destiny. This is an origin of their Kralizec legend: the
war at the end of the universe.
-- Bene Gesserit Private Reports/folio 800881
%
The spirit of Muad'Dib is more than words, more than the letter of the Law
which arises in his name. Muad'Dib must always be that inner outrage against
the complacently powerful, against the charlatans and the dogmatic fanatics.
It is that inner outrage which must have its say because Muad'Dib taught us
one thing above all others: that humans can endure only in a fraternity of
social justice.
-- The Fedaykin Compact
%
Limits of survival are set by climate, those long drifts of change which a
generation may fail to notice. And it is the extremes of climate which set the
pattern. Lonely, finite humans may observe climatic provinces, fluctuations of
annual weather and, occasionally may observe such things as "This is a colder
year than I've ever known. " Such things are sensible. But humans are seldom
alerted to the shifting average through a great span of years. And it is
precisely in this alerting that humans learn how to survive on any planet.
They must learn climate.
-- Arrakis, the Transformation, After Harq al-Ada
%
Thou didst divide the sand by thy strength; Thou breakest the heads of the
dragons in the desert. Yea, I behold thee as a beast coming up from the dunes;
thou hast the two horns of the lamb, but thou speakest as the dragon.
-- Revised Orange Catholic Bible Arran 11:4
%
Fremen were the first humans to develop a conscious/unconscious symbology
through which to experience the movements and relationships of their planetary
system. They were the first people anywhere to express climate in terms of a
semi-mathematic language whose written symbols embody (and internalize) the
external relationships. The language itself was part of the system it
described. Its written form carried the shape of what it described.
The intimate local knowledge of what was available to support life was implicit
in this development. One can measure the extent of this language/system
interaction by the fact that Fremen accepted themselves as foraging and
browsing animals.
-- The Story of Liet-Kynes by Harq al-Ada
%
After the Fremen, all Planetologists see life as expressions of energy and look
for the overriding relationships. In small pieces, bits and parcels which grow
into general understanding, the Fremen racial wisdom is translated into a new
certainty. The thing Fremen have as a people, any people can have. They need
but develop a sense for energy relationships. They need but observe that energy
soaks up the patterns of things and builds with those patterns.
-- The Arrakeen Catastrophe, After Harq al-Ada
%
Any path which 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 sand. Sexually produced uniqueness
and differences are the life-protection of the spices.
-- The Spacing Guild Handbook
%
By these acts Leto II removed himself from the evolutionary succession.
He did it with a deliberate cutting action, saying: "To be independent is to be
removed." Both twins saw beyond the needs of memory as a measuring process,
that is, a way of determining their distance from their human origins. But it
was left to Leto II to do the audacious thing, recognizing that a real creation
is independent of its creator. He refused to reenact the evolutionary sequence,
saying, "That, too, takes me farther and farther from humanity." He saw the
implications in this: that there can be no truly closed systems in life.
-- The Holy Metamorphosis, by Harq al-Ada
%
Muad'Dib was disinherited and he spoke for the disinherited of all time.
He cried out against that profound injustice which alienates the individual
from that which he was taught to believe, from that which seemed to come to
him as a right.
-- The Mahdinate, An Analysis by Harq al-Ada
%
Church and State, scientific reason and faith, the individual and his
community, even progress and tradition -- all of these can be reconciled in the
teachings of Muad'Dib. He taught us that there exist no intransigent opposites
except in the beliefs of men. Anyone can rip aside the veil of Time. You can
discover the future in the past or in your own imagination. Doing this, you win
back your consciousness in your inner being. You know then that the universe is
a coherent whole and you are indivisible from it.
-- The Preacher at Arrakeen, After Harq al-Ada
%
Muad'Dib gave us a particular kind of knowledge about prophetic insight, about
the behavior which surrounds such insight and its influence upon events which
are seen to be "on line." (That is, events which are set to occur in a related
system which the prophet reveals and interprets.) As has been noted elsewhere,
such insight operates as a peculiar trap for the prophet himself. He can become
the victim of what he knows -- which is a relatively common human failing. The
danger is that those who predict real events may overtook the polarizing effect
brought about by overindulgence in their own truth. They tend to forget that
nothing in a polarized universe can exist without its opposite being present.
-- The Prescient Vision, by Harq al-Ada
%
The child who refuses to travel in the father's harness, this is the symbol of
man's most unique capability. "I do not have to be what my father was. I do not
have to obey my father's rules or even believe everything he believed. It is my
strength as a human that I can make my own choices of what to believe and what
not to believe, of what to be and what not to be."
-- Leto Atreides II, The Harq al-Ada Biography
%
The assumption that a whole system can be made to work better through
an assault on its conscious elements betrays a dangerous ignorance.
This has often been the ignorant approach of those who call themselves
scientists and technologists.
-- The Butlerian Jihad, by Harq al-Ada
%
As with so many other religions, Muad'Dib's Golden Elixir of Life degenerated
into external wizardry. Its mystical signs became mere symbols for deeper
psychological processes, and those processes, of course, ran wild. What they
needed was a living god, and they didn't have one, a situation which Muad'Dib's
son has corrected.
-- Saying attributed to Lu Tung-pin, (Lu, The Guest of the Cavern)
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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. And take the most
special care that you locate Muad'Dib in his place: the planet Arrakis. Do not
be deceived by the fact that he was born on Caladan and lived his first fifteen
years there. Arrakis, the planet known as Dune, is forever his place.
-- from "Manual of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
To attempt an understanding of Muad'Dib without understanding his mortal
enemies, the Harkonnens, is to attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood.
It is the attempt to see the Light without knowing Darkness. It cannot be.
-- from "Manual of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
Thus spoke St. Alia-of-the-Knife: "The Reverend Mother must combine the
seductive wiles of a courtesan with the untouchable majesty of a virgin
goddess, holding these attributes in tension so long as the powers of her
youth endure. For when youth and beauty have gone, she will find that the
place-between, once occupied by tension, has become a wellspring of cunning
and resourcefulness."
-- from "Muad'Dib, Family Commentaries" by the Princess Irulan
%
You have read that Muad'Dib had no playmates his own age on Caladan. The
dangers were too great. But Muad'Dib did have wonderful companion-teachers.
There was Gurney Halleck, the troubadour-warrior. You will sing some of
Gurney's songs, as you read along in this book. There was Thufir Hawat, the old
Mentat Master of Assassins, who struck fear even into the heart of the Padishah
Emperor. There were Duncan Idaho, the Swordmaster of the Ginaz; Dr. Wellington
Yueh, a name black in treachery but bright in knowledge; the Lady Jessica, who
guided her son in the Bene Gesserit Way, and -- of course -- the Duke Leto,
whose qualities as a father have long been overlooked.
-- from "A Child's History of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
YUEH (yu'e), Wellington (weling-tun), Stdrd 10,082-10,191; medical doctor of
the Suk School (grd Stdrd 10,112); md: Wanna Marcus, B.G. (Stdrd
10,092-10,186?); chiefly noted as betrayer of Duke Leto Atreides. (Cf:
Bibliography, Appendix VII [Imperial Conditioning] and Betrayal, The.)
-- from "Dictionary of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
How do we approach the study of Muad'Dib's father? A man of surpassing warmth
and surprising coldness was the Duke Leto Atreides. Yet, many facts open the
way to this Duke: his abiding love for his Bene Gesserit lady; the dreams he
held for his son; the devotion with which men served him. You see him there --
a man snared by Destiny, a lonely figure with his light dimmed behind the glory
of his son. Still, one must ask: What is the son but an extension of the father?
-- from "Muad'Dib, Family Commentaries" by the Princess Irulan
%
With the Lady Jessica and Arrakis, the Bene Gesserit system of sowing
implant-legends through the Missionaria Protectiva came to its full fruition.
The wisdom of seeding the known universe with a prophecy pattern for the
protection of B.G. personnel has long been appreciated, but never have we seen
a condition-ut-extremis with more ideal mating of person and preparation. The
prophetic legends had taken on Arrakis even to the extent of adopted labels
(including Reverend Mother, canto and respondu, and most of the Shari-a
panoplia propheticus). And it is generally accepted now that the Lady Jessica's
latent abilities were grossly underestimated.
-- from "Analysis: The Arrakeen Crisis" by the Princess Irulan [Private
circulation: B.G. file number AR-81088587]
%
"Yueh! Yueh! Yueh!" goes the refrain. "A million deaths were not enough for
Yueh!"
-- from "A Child's History of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
Many have marked the speed with which Muad'Dib learned the necessities of
Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit, of course, know the basis of this speed. For the
others, we can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was
in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could
learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn,
and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every
experience carries its lesson.
-- from "The Humanity of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
What had the Lady Jessica to sustain her in her time of trial? Think you
carefully on this Bene Gesserit proverb and perhaps you will see: "Any road
followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just
a little bit to test that it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you
cannot see the mountain."
-- from "Muad'Dib: Family Commentaries" by the Princess Irulan
%
It is said that the Duke Leto blinded himself to the perils of Arrakis, that he
walked heedlessly into the pit. Would it not be more likely to suggest he had
lived so long in the presence of extreme danger he misjudged a change in its
intensity? Or is it possible he deliberately sacrificed himself that his son
might find a better life? All evidence indicates the Duke was a man not easily
hoodwinked.
-- from "Muad'Dib: Family Commentaries" by the Princess Irulan
%
Over the exit of the Arrakeen landing field, crudely carved as though with
a poor instrument, there was an inscription that Muad'Dib was to repeat many
times. He saw it that first night on Arrakis, having been brought to the ducal
command post to participate in his father's first full staff conference.
The words of the inscription were a plea to those leaving Arrakis, but they
fell with dark import on the eyes of a boy who had just escaped a close brush
with death. They said: "O you who know what we suffer here, do not forget us
in your prayers."
-- from "Manual of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
On that first day when Muad'Dib rode through the streets of Arrakeen with his
family, some of the people along the way recalled the legends and the prophecy
and they ventured to shout: "Mahdi!" But their shout was more a question than a
statement, for as yet they could only hope he was the one foretold as the Lisan
al-Gaib, the Voice from the Outer World. Their attention was focused, too, on
the mother, because they had heard she was a Bene Gesserit and it was obvious
to them that she was like the other Lisan al-Gaib.
-- from "Manual of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
"There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the
one in which you discover your father is a man--with human flesh."
-- from "Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
My father, the Padishah Emperor, took me by the hand one day and I sensed in
the ways my mother had taught me that he was disturbed. He led me down the Hall
of Portraits to the ego-likeness of the Duke Leto Atreides. I marked the strong
resemblance between them--my father and this man in the portrait--both with
thin, elegant faces and sharp features dominated by cold eyes.
"Princess-daughter," my father said, "I would that you'd been older when it
came time for this man to choose a woman." My father was 71 at the time and
looking no older than the man in the portrait, and I was but 14, yet I remember
deducing in that instant that my father secretly wished the Duke had been his
son, and disliked the political necessities that made them enemies.
-- "In My Father's House" by the Princess Irulan
%
Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. 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.
-- from "Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
"There is no escape--we pay for the violence of our ancestors. "
-- from "The Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
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.
-- Dirge for Jamis on the Funeral Plain,
from "Songs of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times
and oppression to develop psychic muscles.
-- from "Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife--chopping off what's
incomplete and saying: "Now, it's complete because it's ended here."
-- from "Collected Sayings of, Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
There is a legend that the instant the Duke Leto Atreides died a meteor
streaked across the skies above his ancestral palace on Caladan.
-- the Princess Irulan: "Introduction to A Child's History of Muad'Dib"
%
O Seas of Caladan,
O people of Duke Leto--
Citadel of Leto fallen,
Fallen forever . . .
-- from "Songs of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
When my father, the Padishah Emperor, heard of Duke Leto's death and the
manner of it, he went into such a rage as we had never before seen. He blamed
my mother and the compact forced on him to place a Bene Gesserit on the throne.
He blamed the Guild and the evil old Baron. He blamed everyone in sight, not
excepting even me, for he said I was a witch like all the others. And when I
sought to comfort him, saying it was done according to an older law of
self-preservation to which even the most ancient rulers gave allegiance, he
sneered at me and asked if I thought him a weakling. I saw then that he had
been aroused to this passion not by concern over the dead Duke but by what
that death implied for all royalty. As I look back on it, I think there may
have been some prescience in my father, too, for it is certain that his line
and Muad'Dib's shared common ancestry.
-- "In My Father's House," by the Princess Irulan
%
My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the
basis for all morality. "Something cannot emerge from nothing," he said.
This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable "the truth" can be.
-- from "Conversations with Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
Muad'Dib could indeed, see the Future, but you must understand the limits
of this power. Think of sight. You have eyes, yet cannot see without light.
If you are on the floor of a valley, you cannot see beyond your valley.
Just so, Muad'Dib could not always choose to look across the mysterious
terrain. He tells us that a single obscure decision of prophecy, perhaps
the choice of one word over another, could change the entire aspect of the
future. He tells us "The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through
it, time becomes a narrow door." And always, he fought the temptation to
choose a clear, safe course, warning "That path leads ever down into
stagnation."
-- from "Arrakis Awakening" by the Princess Irulan
%
What do you despise? By this are you truly known.
-- from "Manual of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
At the age of fifteen, he had already learned silence.
-- from "A Child's History of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
We came from Caladan--a paradise world for our form of fife. 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.
-- from "Muad'Dib: Conversations" by the Princess Irulan
%
Family life of the Royal Creche is difficult for many people to understand,
but I shall try to give you a capsule view of it. My father had only one real
friend, I think. That was Count Hasimir Fenring, the genetic-eunuch and one of
the deadliest fighters in the Imperium. The Count, a dapper and ugly little
man, brought a new slave-concubine to my father one day and I was dispatched
by my mother to spy on the proceedings. All of us spied on my father as a matter
of self-protection. One of the slave-concubines permitted my father under the
Bene Gesserit-Guild agreement could not, of course, bear a Royal Successor,
but the intrigues were constant and oppressive in their similarity. We became
adept, my mother and sisters and I, at avoiding subtle instruments of death.
It may seem a dreadful thing to say, but I 'm not at all sure my father was
innocent in all these attempts. A Royal Family is not like other families.
Here was a new slave-concubine, then, red-haired like my father, willowy and
graceful. She had a dancer's muscles, and her training obviously had included
neuro-enticement. My father looked at her for a long time as she postured
unclothed before him. Finally he said: "She is too beautiful. We will save her
as a gift. " You have no idea how much consternation this restraint created in
the Royal Creche. Subtlety and self-control were, after all, the most deadly
threats to us all.
-- "In My Father's House" by the Princess Irulan
%
This Fremen religious adaptation, then, is the source of what we now
recognize as "The Pillars of the Universe," whose Qizara Tafwid are among us
all with signs and proofs and prophecy. They bring us the Arrakeen mystical
fusion whose profound beauty is typified by the stirring music built on the
old forms, but stamped with the new awakening. Who has not heard and been
deeply moved by "The Old Man's Hymn"?
I drove my feet through a desert
Whose mirage fluttered like a host.
Voracious for glory, greedy for danger,
I roamed the horizons of al-Kulab,
Watching time level mountains
In its search and its hunger for me.
And I saw the sparrows swiftly approach,
Bolder than the onrushing wolf.
They spread in the tree of my youth.
I heard the flock in my branches
And was caught on their beaks and claws!
-- from "Arrakis Awakening" by the Princess Irulan
%
Prophecy and prescience--How can they be put to the test in the face of the
unanswered questions? Consider: How much is actual prediction of the "waveform"
(as Muad'Dib referred to his vision-image) and how much is the prophet shaping
the future to fit the prophecy? What of the harmonics inherent in the act of
prophecy? Does the prophet see the future or does he see a line of weakness,
a fault or cleavage that he may shatter with words or decisions as a
diamond-cutter shatters his gem with a blow of a knife?
-- "Private Reflections on Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called
"spannungsbogen"--which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing
and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.
-- from "The Wisdom of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
My father, the Padishah Emperor, was 72 yet looked no more than 35 the year
he encompassed the death of Duke Leto and gave Arrakis back to the Harkonnens.
He seldom appeared in public wearing other than a Sardaukar uniform and
a Burseg's black helmet with the imperial lion in gold upon its crest.
The uniform was an open reminder of where his power lay. He was not always
that blatant, though. When he wanted, he could radiate charm and sincerity,
but I often wonder in these later days if anything about him was as it seemed.
I think now he was a man fighting constantly to escape the bars of an invisible
cage. You must remember that he was an emperor, father-head of a dynasty that
reached back into the dimmest history. But we denied him a legal son.
Was this not the most terrible defeat a ruler ever suffered? My mother obeyed
her Sister Superiors where the Lady Jessica disobeyed. Which of them was the
stronger? History already has answered.
-- "In My Father's House" by the Princess Irulan
%
God created Arrakis to train the faithful.
-- from "The Wisdom of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism
to shield us from the terrors of the future.
-- from "Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
Muad'Dib tells us in "A Time of Reflection" that his first collisions with
Arrakeen necessities were the true beginnings of his education. He learned then
how to pole the sand for its weather, learned the language of the wind's
needles stinging his skin, learned how the nose can buzz with sand-itch and how
to gather his body's precious moisture around him to guard it and preserve it.
As his eyes assumed the blue of the Ibad, he learned the Chakobsa way.
-- Stilgar's preface to "Muad'Dib, the Man" by the Princess Irulan
%
The hands move, the lips move --
Ideas gush from his words,
And his eyes devour!
He is an island of Selfdom.
-- description from "A Manual of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
No woman, no man, no child ever was deeply intimate with my father. The closest
anyone ever came to casual camaraderie with the Padishah Emperor was the
relationship offered by Count Hasimir Fenring, a companion from childhood. The
measure of Count Fenring's friendship may be seen first in a positive thing: he
allayed the Landsraad's suspicions after the Arrakis Affair. It cost more than
a billion solaris in spice bribes, so my mother said, and there were other
gifts as well: slave women, royal honors, and tokens of rank. The second major
evidence of the Count's friendship was negative. He refused to kill a man even
though it was within his capabilities and my father commanded it. I will relate
this presently.
-- "Count Fenring: A Profile" by the Princess Irulan
%
Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that
makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.
-- from "The Sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry,
elegance, and grace -- those qualities you find always in that which the true
artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand
trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the
pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our
society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is
possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that
the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things
move toward death.
-- from "The Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
"Control the coinage and the courts -- let the rabble have the rest." Thus the
Padishah Emperor advises you. And he tells you: "If you want profits, you must
rule." There is truth in these words, but I ask myself: "Who are the rabble and
who are the ruled?"
-- Muad'Dib's Secret Message to the Landsraad from "Arrakis Awakening" by the
Princess Irulan
%
You cannot avoid the interplay of politics within an orthodox religion. This
power struggle permeates the training, educating and disciplining of the
orthodox community. Because of this pressure, the leaders of such a community
inevitably must face that ultimate internal question: to succumb to complete
opportunism as the price of maintaining their rule, or risk sacrificing
themselves for the sake of the orthodox ethic.
-- from "Muad'Dib: The Religious Issues" by the Princess Irulan
%
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.
-- from "Muad'Dib: The Ninety-Nine Wonders of the Universe" by Princess Irulan
%
How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is
telling him.
-- "The Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
%
And it came to pass in the third year of the Desert War that Paul-Muad'Dib lay
alone in the Cave of Birds beneath the kiswa hangings of an inner cell. And he
lay as one dead, caught up in the revelation of the Water of Life, his being
translated beyond the boundaries of time by the poison that gives life. Thus
was the prophecy made true that the Lisan al-Gaib might be both dead and alive.
-- "Collected Legends of Arrakis" by the Princess Irulan
%
And that day dawned when Arrakis lay at the hub of the
universe with the wheel poised to spin.
-- from "Arrakis Awakening" by the Princess Irulan
%
And Muad'Dib stood before them, and he said: "Though we deem the captive dead,
yet does she live. For her seed is my seed and her voice is my voice. And she
sees unto the farthest reaches of possibility. Yea, unto the vale of the
unknowable does she see because of me."
-- from "Arrakis Awakening" by the Princess Irulan
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Such a rich store of myths enfolds Paul Muad'dib, the Mentat Emperor, and his
sister, Alia, it is difficult to see the real persons behind these veils.
But there were, after all, a man born Paul Atreides and a woman born Alia.
Their flesh was subject to space and time. And even though their oracular
powers placed them beyond the usual limits of time and space, they came from
human stock. They experienced real events which left real traces upon a real
universe. To understand them, it must be seen that their catastrophe was the
catastrophe of all mankind. This work is dedicated, then, not to Muad'dib or
his sister, but to their heirs -- to all of us.
-- Dedication in the Muad'dib Concordance
as copied from The Tabla Memorium of the Mahdi Spirit Cult
%
There exists no separation between gods and men:
one blends softly casual into the other.
-- Proverbs of Muad'dib
%
Every civilization must contend with an unconscious force which can block,
betray or countermand almost any conscious intention of the collectivity.
-- Tleilaxu Theorem (unproven)
%
The advent of the Field Process shield and the lasgun with their explosive
interaction, deadly to attacker and attacked, placed the current
determinatives, on weapons technology. We need not go into the special role of
atomics. The fact that any Family in my Empire could so deploy its atomics as
to destroy the planetary bases of fifty or more other Families causes some
nervousness, true. But all of us possess precautionary plans for devastating
retaliation. Guild and Landsraad contain the keys which hold this force in
check, No, my concern goes to the development of humans as special weapons.
Here is a virtually unlimited field which a few powers are developing.
-- Muad'dib: Lecture to the War College from The Stilgar Chronicle
%
Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is
when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague
ritual.
-- Words of Muad'dib by Princess Irulan.
%
"Once more the drama begins."
-- The Emperor Paul Muad'dib on his ascension to the Lion Throne
%
Truth suffers from too much analysis.
-- Ancient Fremen Saying
%
The Fremen see her as the Earth Figure, a demigoddess whose special charge is
to protect the tribes through her powers of violence. She is Reverend Mother to
their Reverend Mothers. To pilgrims who seek her out with demands that she
restore virility or make the barren fruitful, she is a form of antimentat.
She feeds on that proof that the "analytic" has limits. She represents ultimate
tension. She is the virgin-harlot -- witty, vulgar, cruel, as destructive in
her whims as a coriolis storm.
-- St. Alia of the Knife as taken from The Irulan Report
%
The most dangerous game in the universe is to govern from an oracular base.
We do not consider ourselves wise enough or brave enough to play that game.
The measures detailed here for regulation in lesser matters are as near as
we dare venture to the brink of government. For our purposes, we borrow a
definition from the Bene Gesserit and we consider the various worlds as gene
pools, sources of teachings and teachers, sources of the possible. Our goal
is not to rule, but to tap these gene pools, to learn, and to free ourselves
from all restraints imposed by dependency and government.
-- "The Orgy as a Tool of Statecraft," Chapter Three of The Steersman's Guild
%
Here lies a toppled god --
His fall was not a small one.
We did but build his pedestal,
A narrow and a tall one.
-- Tleilaxu Epigram
%
I think what a joy it is to be alive, and I wonder if I'll ever leap inward
to the root of this flesh and know myself as once I was. The root is there.
Whether any act of mine can find it, that remains tangled in the future.
But all things a man can do are mine. Any act of mine may do it.
-- The Ghola Speaks Alia's Commentary
%
"You do not beg the sun for mercy."
-- Maud'dib's Travail from The Stilgar Commentary
%
"I've had a bellyful of the god and priest business! You think I don't see my
own mythos? Consult your data once more, Hayt. I've insinuated my rites into
the most elementary human acts. The people eat in the name of Muad'dib! They
make love in my name, are born in my name -- cross the street in my name.
A roof beam cannot be raised in the lowliest hovel of far Gangishree
without invoking the blessing of Muad'dib!"
-- Book of Diatribes from The Hayt Chronicle
%
Oh, worm of many teeth,
Canst thou deny what has no cure?
The flesh and breath which lure thee
To the ground of all beginnings
Feed on monsters twisting in a door of fire!
Thou hast no robe in all thy attire
To cover intoxications of divinity
Or hide the burnings of desire!
-- Wormsong from the Dunebook
%
The audacious nature of Muad'dib's actions may be seen in the fact that He knew
from the beginning whither He was bound, yet not once did He step aside from
that path. He put it clearly when He said: "I tell you that I come now to my
time of testing when it will be shown that I am the Ultimate Servant."
Thus He weaves all into One, that both friend and foe may worship Him.
It is for this reason and this reason only that His Apostles prayed: "Lord,
save us from the other paths which Muad'dib covered with the Waters of His Life."
Those "other paths" may be imagined only with the deepest revulsion.
-- from The Yiam-el-Din (Book of Judgment)
%
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, the very
future of humankind, depends upon the relatively simple actions of single
individuals.
-- from The Tlielaxu Godbuk
%
Production growth and income growth must not get out of step in my Empire.
That is the substance of my command. There are to be no balance-of-payment
difficulties between the different spheres of influence. And the reason for
this is simply because I command it. I want to emphasize my authority in this
area. I am the supreme energy-eater of this domain, and will remain so, alive
or dead. My Government is the economy.
-- Order in Council The Emperor Paul Muad'dib
%
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."
-- Addenda to Orders in Council The Emperor Paul Muad'dib
%
He has gone from Alia,
The womb of heaven!
Holy, holy, holy!
Fire-sand leagues
Confront our Lord.
He can see
Without eyes!
A demon upon him!
Holy, holy, holy
Equation:
He solved for
Martyrdom!
-- The Moon Falls Down Songs of Muad'dib
%
Tibana was an apologist for Socratic Christianity, probably a native of IV
Anbus who lived between the eight and ninth centuries before Corrino, likely in
the second reign of Dalamak. Of his writings, only a portion survives from
which this fragment is taken: "The hearts of all men dwell in the same
wilderness."
-- from The Dunebuk of Irulan
%
The sequential nature of actual events is not illuminated with lengthy
precision by the powers of prescience except under the most extraordinary
circumstances. The oracle grasps incidents cut out of the historic chain.
Eternity moves. It inflicts itself upon the oracle and the supplicant alike.
Let Muad'dib's subjects doubt his majesty and his oracular visions.
Let them deny his powers. Let them never doubt Eternity.
-- The Dune Gospels
%
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.
-- Muad'dib on Law, The Stilgar Commentary
%
There was a man so wise,
He jumped into
A sandy place
And burnt out both his eyes!
And when he knew his eyes were gone,
He offered no complaint.
He summoned up a vision
And made himself a saint.
-- Children's Verse from History of Muad'dib
%
We say of Muad'dib that he has gone on a journey
into that land where we walk without footprints.
-- Preamble to the Qizarate Creed
%
No bitter stench of funeral-still for Muad'dib.
No knell nor solemn rite to free the mind
From avaricious shadows.
He is the fool saint,
The golden stranger living forever
On the edge of reason.
Let your guard fall and he is there!
His crimson peace and sovereign pallor
Strike into our universe on prophetic webs
To the verge, of a quiet glance -- there!
Out of bristling star-jungles:
Mysterious, lethal, an oracle without eyes,
Catspaw of prophecy, whose voice never dies!
Shai-hulud, he awaits thee upon a strand
Where couples walk and fix, eye to eye,
The delicious ennui of love.
He strides through the long cavern of time,
Scattering the fool-self of his dream.
-- The Ghola's Hymn
%

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I am the most ardent people-watcher who ever lived. I watch them inside me and
outside. Past and present can mingle with odd impositions in me. And as the
metamorphosis continues in my flesh wonderful things happen to my senses.
It's as though I sensed everything in close-up. I have extremely acute hearing
and vision, plus a sense of smell extraordinarily discriminating. I can detect
and identify pheromones at three parts per million. I know. I have tested it.
You cannot hide very much from my senses. I think it would horrify you what
I can detect by smell alone. Your pheromones tell me what you are doing or are
prepared to do. And gesture and posture! I stared for half a day once at an old
man sitting on a bench in Arrakeen. He was a fifth-generation descendant of
Stilgar the Naib and did not even know it. I studied the angle of his neck,
the skin flaps below his chin, the cracked lips and moistness about his
nostrils, the pores behind his ears, the wisps of gray hair which crept from
beneath the hood of his antique stillsuit. Not once did he detect that he was
being watched. Hah! Stilgar would have known it in a second or two. But this
old man was just waiting for someone who never came. He got up finally and
tottered off. He was very stiff after all of that sitting. I knew I would
never see him in the flesh again. He was that near death and his water was
sure to be wasted. Well, that no longer mattered.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
Oh, the landscapes I have seen! And the people! The far wanderings of the
Fremen and all the rest of it. Even back through the myths to Terra. Oh, the
lessons in astronomy and intrigue, the migrations, the disheveled flights, the
leg aching and lung-aching runs through so many nights on all of those cosmic
specks where we have defended our transient possession. I tell you we are a
marvel and my memories leave no doubt of this.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
Sometimes I indulge myself in safaris which no other being may take. I strike
inward along the axis of my memories. Like a schoolchild reporting on a
vacation trip, I take up my subject. Let it be . . . female intellectuals!
I course backward into the ocean which is my ancestors. I am a great winged
fish in the depths. The mouth of my awareness opens and I scoop them up!
Sometimes... sometimes I hunt out specific persons recorded in our histories.
What a private joy to relive the life of such a one while I mock the academic
pretentions which supposedly formed a biography.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
You, the first person to encounter my chronicles for at least four thousand
years, beware. Do not feel honored by your primacy in reading the revelations
of my Ixian storehouse. You will find much pain in it. Other than the few
glimpses required to assure me that the Golden Path continued. I never wanted
to peer beyond those four millennia. Therefore, I am not sure what the events
in my journals may signify to your times. I only know that my journals have
suffered oblivion and that the events which I recount have undoubtedly been
submitted to historical distortion for eons. I assure you that the ability
to view our futures can become a bore. Even to be thought of as a god,
as I certainly was, can become ultimately boring. It has occurred to me
more than once that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the
invention of free will.
-- Inscription on the storehouse at bar-es-Balat
%
I tell you this in the hope that it will help you understand why I ad as I do
in the full knowledge that great forces accumulate in my Empire with but one
wish-the wish to destroy me. You who read these words may know full well what
actually happened, but I doubt that you understand it.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
Some say I have no conscience. How false they are, even to themselves.
I am the only conscience which has ever existed. As wine retains the perfume
of its cask, I retain the essence of my most ancient genesis, and that is
the seed of conscience. That is what makes me holy. I am God because I am
the only one who really knows his heredity!
-- The Stolen Journals
%
You must remember that I have at my internal demand every expertise known to
our history. This is the fund of energy I -draw upon when I address the
mentality of war. If you have not heard the moaning cries of the wounded and
the dying, you do not know about war. I have heard those cries in such numbers
that they haunt me. I have cried out myself in the aftermath of battle. I have
suffered wounds in every epoch-wounds from fist and club and rock, from
shell-studded limb and bronze sword, from the mace and the cannon, from arrows
and lasguns and the silent smothering of atomic dust, from biological invasions
which blacken the tongue and drown the lungs, from the swift gush of flame and
the silent working of slow poisons. . . and more I will not recount! I have
seen and felt them all. To those who dare ask why I behave as I do, I say: With
my memories, I can do nothing else. I am not a coward and once I was human.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
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 listen instead to your anger and your rage.
-- Lord Leto to a Penitent, From the Oral History
%
Odd as it may seem, great struggles such as the one you can see emerging from
my journals are not always visible to the participants. Much depends on what
people dream in the secrecy of their hearts. I have always been as concerned
with the shaping of dreams as with the shaping of actions. Between the lines of
my journals is the struggle with humankind's view of itself-a sweaty contest on
a field where motives from our darkest past can well up out of an unconscious
reservoir and become events with which we not only must live but contend.
It is the hydraheaded monster which always attacks from your blind side.
I pray, therefore, that when you have traversed my portion of the Golden Path
you no longer will be innocent children dancing to music you cannot hear.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
How sad it was that the Shadout of old had become today's Fish Speaker. And a
true crysknife had been used to bind a servant more strongly to her master.
He knew that some thought his Fish Speakers were really priestesses
-- Leto's answer to the Bene Gesserit.
%
The Duncans always think it odd that I choose women for combat forces, but my
Fish Speakers are a temporary army in every sense. While they can be violent
and vicious, women are profoundly different from men in their dedication to
battle. The cradle of genesis ultimately predisposes them to behavior more
protective of life. They have proved to be the best keepers of the Golden Path.
I reinforce this in my design for their training. They are set aside for a time
from ordinary routines. I give them special sharings which they can look back
upon' with pleasure for the rest of their lives. They come of age in the
company of their sisters in preparation for events more profound. What you
share in such companionship always prepares you for greater things. The haze
of nostalgia covers their days among their sisters, making those days into
something different than they were. That's the way today changes history.
All contemporaries do not inhabit the same time. The past is always changing,
but few realize it.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
I know the evil of my ancestors because I am those people. The balance is
delicate in the extreme. I know that few of you who read my words have ever
thought about your ancestors this way. It has not occurred to you that your
ancestors were survivors and that the survival itself sometimes involved savage
decisions, a kind of wanton brutality which civilized humankind works very hard
to suppress. What price will you pay for that suppression? Will you accept your
own extinction?
-- The Stolen Journals
%
What is the most profound difference between us, between you and me? You
already know it. It's these ancestral memories. Mine come at me in the full
glare of awareness. Yours work from your blind side. Some call it instinct or
fate. The memories apply their leverages to each of us-on what we think and
what we do. You think you are immune to such influences? I am Galileo. I stand
here and tell you: "Yet it moves." That which moves can exert its force in ways
no mortal power ever before dared stem. I am here to dare this.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
The female sense of sharing originated as familial sharing-care of the young,
the gathering and preparation of food, sharing joys, love and sorrows. Funeral
lamentation originated with women. Religion began as a female monopoly, wrested
from them only after its social power became too dominant. Women were the first
medical researchers and Practitioners. There has never been any clear balance
between the sexes because power goes with certain roles as it certainly goes
with knowledge.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
Unceasing warfare gives rise to its own social conditions which have been
similar in all epochs. People enter a permanent state of alertness to ward
off attacks. You seethe absolute rule of the autocrat. All new things become
dangerous frontier districts-new planets, new economic areas to exploit, new
ideas or new devices, visitors-everything suspect. Feudalism takes firm hold,
sometimes disguised as a politbureau or similar structure, but always present.
Hereditary succession follows the lines of power. The blood of the powerful
dominates. The vice regents of heaven or their equivalent apportion the wealth.
And their know they must control inheritance or slowly let the power melt away.
Now, do you understand Leto's Peace?
-- The Stolen Journals
%
Our ancestor, Assur-nasir-apli, who was known as the cruelest of the cruel,
seized the throne by slaying his own father and starting the reign of the
sword. His conquests included the Ururnia Lake region. which led him to
Commagene and Khabur. His son received tribute from the Shuites, from Tyre,
Sidon, Gebel and even from Jehu, son of Omri whose very name struck terror
into thousands. The conquests which began with Assur-nasirapli carried arms
into Media and later into Israel, Damascus, Edom, Arpad, Babylon and Umlias.
Does anyone remember these names and places now? I have given you enough clues:
Try to name the planet.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
I am beginning to hate water. The sandtrout skin which impels my metamorphosis
has learned the sensitivities of the worm. Moneo and many of my guards know my
aversion, Only Moneo suspects the truth, that this marks an important waypoint.
I can feel my ending in it, not soon as Moneo measures time, but soon enough as
I endure it. Sandtrout swarmed to water in the Dune days, a problem during the
early stages of our symbiosis. The enforcement of my will power controlled the
urge then, and until we reached a time of balance. Now, I must avoid water
because there are no other sandtrout, only the half dormant creatures of my
skin. Without sandtrout to bring this world back to desert, Shai-Hulud will not
emerge; the sandworm cannot evolve until the land is parched. I am their only
hope.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
"Another Festival so soon?" the Lord Leto asked.
"It has been ten years," the majordomo said.
Do you think by this exchange that the Lord Leto betrays an ignorance of time's
passage?
-- The Oral History
%
From that welter of memories which I can tap at will, patterns emerge. They are
like another language which I see so clearly The social-alarm signals which put
societies into the postures of defense attack are like shouted words to me.
As a people. you react against threats to innocence and the peril of the
helpless young. Unexplained sounds, visions and smells raise the hackles you
have forgotten you possess. When alarmed, you cling to your native language
because all the other patterned sounds are strange. You demand acceptable
dress because a strange costume is threatening. This is system feedback at
its most primitive level. Your cells remember
-- The Stolen Journals
%
Safaris through ancestral memories teach me many things. The patterns, ahhh,
the patterns Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me most. I distrust the
extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over
any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It's true! Liberal
governments always develop into aristocracies The bureaucracies betray the true
intent of people who form such governments. Right from the first, the little
people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens
found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of
course, all bureaucracies follow this pattern. but what a hypocrisy to find
this even under a communized banner Ahhh, well, if patterns teach me anything
it's that patterns are repeated. My oppressions. by and large, are no worse
than any of the others and, at least. I teach a new lesson.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
The trance-state of prophecy is like no other visionary experience. It is not
a retreat from the raw exposure of the senses (as are many trance-states) but
an immersion in a multitude of new movements. Things moue. It is an ultimate
pragmatism in the midst of Infinity, a demanding consciousness where you come
at last into the unbroken awareness that the universe moves of itself, that it
changes, that its rules change. that nothing remains permanent or absolute
throughout all such movement, that mechanical explanations for anything can
work only within precise confinements and, once the walls are broken down, the
old explanations shatter and dissolve, blown away by new movements. The things
you see in this trance are sobering, often shattering They demand your utmost
effort to remain whole and. even so, you emerge from that state profoundly
changed.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
When I set out to lead humankind along my Golden Path. I promised them a lesson
their bones would remember. I know a profound pattern which humans deny with
their words even while their actions affirm it. They say they seek security and
quiet, the condition they call peace. Even as they speak. they create the seeds
of turmoil and violence. If they find their quiet security. they squirm in it.
How boring they find it. Look at them now. Look at what they do while I record
these words. Hah! I give them enduring eons of enforced tranquility which plods
on and on despite their every effort to escape into chaos. Believe me, the
memory of Leto's Peace shall abide with them forever. They will seek their
quiet security thereafter only with extreme caution and steadfast preparation.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
As each day passes, you become increasingly unreal, more alien and remote from
what I find myself to be on that new day. I am the only reality and, as you
differ from me, you lose reality. The more curious I become, the less curious
are those who worship me. Religion suppresses curiosity. What I do subtracts
from the worshipper. Thus it is that eventually I will do nothing, giving it
all back to frightened people who will ,find themselves on that day alone and
forced to act for themselves.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
The problem of leadership is inevitably: Who will play God?
-- Muad'Dib. From the Oral History
%
I am both father and mother to my people. I have known the ecstasy of birth and
the ecstasy of death and I know the patterns that you must team. Have I not
wandered intoxicated through the universe of shapes? Yes! I have seen you
outlined in light. That universe which you say you see and feel, that universe
is my dream. My energies focus upon it and I am in any realm and every realm.
Thus, you are born.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
I have isolated the city-experience within me and have examined it closely.
The idea of a city fascinates me. The formation of a biological community
without a functioning, supportive social community leads to havoc. Whole
worlds have become single biological communities without an interrelated
social structure and this has always led to ruin. It becomes dramatically
instructive under overcrowded conditions. The ghetto is lethal. Psychic
stresses of overcrowding create pressures which will erupt. The city is an
attempt to manage these forces. The social forms by which cities make the
attempt are worth study. Remember that there exists a certain malevolence
about the formation of any social order. It is the struggle for existence
by an artificial entity. Despotism and slavery hover at the edges.
Many injuries occur and, thus, the need for laws. The law develops its
own power structure, creating more wounds and new injustices. Such trauma
can be healed by cooperation, not by confrontation. The summons to cooperate
identifies the healer.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
The singular multiplicity of this universe draws my deepest attention.
It is a thing of ultimate beauty.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
Groups tend to condition their surroundings for group survival. When they
deviate from this it may be taken as a sign of group sickness. There are
many telltale symptoms. I watch the sharing of food. This is a form of
communication, an inescapable sign of mutual aid which also contains a deadly
signal of dependency. It is interesting that men are the ones who usually tend
the landscape today. They are husband-men. Once, that was the sole province of
women.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
If you know all of your ancestors, you were a personal witness to the events
which created the myths and religions of our past. Recognizing this, you must
think of me as a myth-maker.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
Let there be no doubt that I am the assemblage of our ancestors, the arena in
which they exercise my moments. They are my cells and I am their body. This is
the favrashi of which I speak, the soul, the collective unconscious, the source
of archetypes, the repository of all trauma and joy. I am the choice of their
awakening. My samhadi is their samhadi. Their experiences are mine! Their
knowledge distilled is mfr inheritance. Those billions are my one.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
"Make no heroes," my father said.
-- The voice of Ghanima, From the Oral History
%
The prophet is not diverted by illusions of past, present and future. The
fixity of language determines such linear distinctions. Prophets hold a key to
the lock in a language. The mechanical image remains only an image to them.
This is not a mechanical universe. The linear progression of events is imposed
by the observer. Cause and effect? That's not it at all. The prophet utters
fateful words. You glimpse a thing "destined to occur." But the prophetic
instant releases something of infinite portent and power. The universe
undergoes a ghostly shift. Thus, the wise prophet conceals actuality behind
shimmering labels. The uninitiated then believe the prophetic language is
ambiguous. The listener distrusts the prophetic messenger. Instinct tells
you how the utterance blunts the power of such words. The best prophets
lead you up to the curtain and let you peer through for yourself.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
The pattern of monarchies and similar systems has a message of value for all
political forms. My memories assure me that governments of any kind could
profit from this message. Governments can be useful to the governed only so
long as inherent tendencies toward tyranny are restrained. Monarchies have
some good features beyond their star qualities. They can reduce the size and
parasitic nature of the management bureaucracy. They can make speedy decisions
when necessary. They fit an ancient human demand for a parental (tribal/feudal)
hierarchy where every person knows his place. It is valuable to know your
place, even if that place is temporary. It is galling to be held in place
against your will. This is why I teach about tyranny in the best possible way
by example. Even though you read these words after a passage of eons, my
tyranny will not be forgotten. My Golden Path assures this. Knowing my message,
I expect you to be exceedingly careful about the powers you delegate to any
government.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
You know the myth of the Great Spice Hoard? Yes, I know about that story, too.
A majordomo brought it to me one day to amuse me. The story says there is a
hoard of melange, a gigantic hoard, big as a great mountain. The hoard is
concealed in the depths of a distant planet. It is not Arrakis, that planet.
It is not Dune. The spice was hidden there long ago, even before the First
Empire and the Spacing Guild. The story says Paul Muad'Dib went there and
lives yet beside the hoard, kept alive by it, waiting. The majordomo did not
understand why the story disturbed me.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
Memory has a curious meaning to me, a meaning I have hoped others might share.
It continually astonished me how people hide from their ancestral memories,
shielding themselves behind a thick barrier of mythos. Ohhh, I do not expect
them to seek the terrible immediacy of every living moment which I must
experience. I can understand that they might not want to be submerged in a mush
of petty ancestral details. You have reason to fear that your living moments
might be taken over by others. Yet, the meaning is there within those memories.
We carry all of our ancestry forward like a living wave, all of the hopes and
joys and griefs, the agonies and the exultations of our past. Nothing within
those memories remains completely without meaning or influence, not as long as
there is a humankind somewhere. We have that bright Infinity all around us,
that Golden Path of forever to which we can continually pledge our puny but
inspired allegiance.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
The realization of what I am occurs in the timeless awareness which does not
stimulate nor delude. I create a field without self or center, a field where
even death becomes only analogy. I desire no results. I merely permit this
field which has no goals nor desires, no perfections nor even visions of
achievements. In that field, omnipresent primal awareness is all. It is the
light which pours through the windows of my universe.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
One of the most terrible words in any language is Soldier. The synonyms parade
through our history: yogahnee, trooper, hussar, kareebo, cossack, deranzeef,
legionnaire, sardaukar, fish speaker... I know them all. They stand there in
the ranks of my memory to remind me: Always make sure you have the army with
you.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
Do you know what guerrillas often say? They claim that their rebellions are
invulnerable to economic warfare because they have no economy, that they are
parasitic on those they would overthrow. The fools merely fail to assess the
coin in which they must inevitably pay. The pattern is inexorable in its
degenerative failures. You see it repeated in the systems of slavery, of
welfare states, of caste-ridden religions, of socializing bureaucracies-in
any system which creates and maintains dependencies. Too long a parasite and
you cannot exist without a host.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
In the cradle of our past, I lay upon my back in a cave so shallow I could
penetrate it only by squirming, not by crawling. There, by the dancing light of
a resin torch, I drew upon walls and ceiling the creatures of the hunt and the
souls of my people. How illuminating it is to peer backward through a perfect
circle at that ancient struggle for the visible moment of the soul. All time
vibrates to that call: "Here I am!" With a mind informed by artist-giants who
came afterward, I peer at handprints and flowing muscles drawn upon the rock
with charcoal and vegetable dyes. How much more we are than mere mechanical
events! And my anti-civil self demands: "Why is it that they do not want to
leave the cave?"
-- The Stolen Journals
%
The Duncans sometimes ask if I understand the exotic ideas of our past?
And if I understand them, why can't I explain them? Knowledge, the Duncans
believe, resides only in particulars. I try to tell them that all words are
plastic. Word images begin to distort in the instant of utterance. Ideas
imbedded in a language require that particular language for expression.
This is the very essence of the meaning within the word exotic. See how it
begins to distort? Translation squirms in the presence of the exotic.
The Galach which I speak here imposes itself. It is an outside frame of
reference, a particular system. Dangers lurk in all systems. Systems
incorporate the unexamined beliefs of their creators. Adopt a system, accept
its beliefs, and you help strengthen the resistance to change. Does it
serve any purpose for me to tell the Duncans that there are no languages
for some things? Ahhh! But the Duncans believe that all languages are mine.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
Given enough time for the generations to evolve, the predator produces
particular survival adaptations in its prey which, through the circular
operation of feedback, produce changes in the predator which again change the
prey etcetera, etcetera, etcetera .... Many powerful forces do the same thing.
You can count religions among such forces.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
It required almost a thousand years before the dust of Dune's old planet-wide
desert left the atmosphere to be bound up in soil and water. The wind called
sandblaster has not been seen on Arrakis for some twenty-five hundred years.
Twenty billion tons of dust could be carried suspended in the wind of just one
of those storms. The sky often had a silvery look to it then. Fremen said:
"The desert is a surgeon cutting away the skin to expose what's underneath."
The planet and the people had layers. You could see them. My Sareer is but
a weak echo of what was. I must be the sandblaster today.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
Most civilization is based on cowardice. It's so easy to civilize by teaching
cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery.
You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons.
You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos.
You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
What is the most immediate danger to my stewardship? I will tell you.
It is a true visionary, a person who has stood in the presence of God
with the full knowledge of where he stands. Visionary ecstasy releases
energies which are like the energies of sex-uncaring for anything
except creation. One act of creation can be much like another.
Everything depends upon the vision.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
You cannot understand history unless you understand its flowings, its
currents and the ways leaders move within such forces. A leader tries to
perpetuate the conditions which demand his leadership. Thus, the leader
requires the outsider. I caution you to examine my career with care.
I am both leader and outsider. Do not make the mistake of assuming that I
only created the Church which was the State. That was my function as leader
and I had many historical models to use as pattern. For a clue to my role as
outsider, look at the arts of my time. The arts are barbaric. The favorite
poetry? The Epic. The popular dramatic ideal? Heroism. Dances? Wildly
abandoned. From Moneo's viewpoint, he is correct in describing this as
dangerous. It stimulates the imagination. It makes people feel the lack of
that which I have taken from them. What did I take from them? The right to
participate in history.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
You think power may be the most unstable of all human achievements?
Then what of the apparent exceptions to this inherent instability?
Some families endure. Very powerful religious bureaucracies have been known
to endure. Consider the relationship between faith and power. Are they
mutually exclusive when each depends upon the other? The Bene Gesserit have
been reasonably secure within the loyal walls of faith for thousands of
years. But where has their power gone?
-- The Stolen Journals
%
Think of it as plastic memory, this force within you which trends you and your
fellows toward tribal forms. This plastic memory seeks to return to its ancient
shape, the tribal society. It is all around you-the feudatory, the diocese, the
corporation, the platoon, the sports club, the dance troupes, the rebel cell,
the planning council, the prayer group . . . each with its master and servants,
its host and parasites. And the swarms of alienating devices (including these
very words!) tend eventually to be enlisted in the argument for a return to
"those better rimes." I despair of teaching you other ways. You have square
thoughts which resist circles.
-- The Stolen Journals
%
What am I eliminating? The bourgeois infatuation with peaceful conservation
of the past. This is a binding force, a thing which holds humankind into one
vulnerable unit in spite of illusionary separations across parsecs of space.
If I can find the scattered bits, others can find them. When you are
together, you can share a common catastrophe. You can be exterminated
together. Thus, I demonstrate the terrible danger of a gliding, passionless
mediocrity, a movement without ambitions or aims. I show you that entire
civilizations can do this thing. I give you eons of life which slips gently
toward death without fuss or stirring, without even asking 'Why?' I show you
the false happiness and the shadow-catastrophe called Leto, the God
Emperor. Now, will you learn the real happiness?
-- The Stolen Journals
%
In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable.
This universe presents only changing relationships which are sometimes seen as
laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshly sensoria which we call self are
ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleetingly aware of temporary
conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change.
If you must label the absolute, use it's proper name: Temporary.
-- The Stolen Journals
%

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Most discipline is hidden discipline, designed not to liberate but to limit.
Do not ask Why? Be cautious with How? Why? leads inexorably to paradox.
How? traps you in a universe of cause and effect. Both deny the infinite.
-- The Apocrypha of Arrakis
%
Explosions are also compressions of time. Observable changes in the natural
universe all are explosive to some degree and from some point of view;
otherwise you would not notice them. Smooth Continuity of change, if slowed
sufficiently, goes without notice by observers whose time/attention span is
too short. Thus, I tell you, I have seen changes you would never have
marked.
-- Leto II
%
The existence of no-ships raises the possibility of destroying entire
planets without retaliation. A large object, asteroid or equivalent, may be
sent against the planet. Or the people can be set against each other by
sexual subversion, and then can be armed to destroy themselves. These
Honored Matres appear to favor this latter technique.
-- Bene Gesserit Analysis
%
Humans live best when each has his place to stand, when each knows where he be
longs in the scheme of things and what he may achieve. Destroy the place and
you destroy the person.
-- Bene Gesserit Teaching
%
Has not religion claimed a patent on creation for all of these millennia?
-- The Tleilaxu Question, from Muad'dib Speaks
%
Some days it's melange; some days it's bitter dirt.
-- Rakian Aphorism
%
The trouble with some kinds of warfare (and be certain the Tyrant knew this,
because it is implicit in his lesson) is that they destroy all moral decency
in susceptible types. Warfare of these kinds will dump the destroyed
survivors back into an innocent population that is incapable of even
imagining what such returned soldiers might do.
-- Teachings of the Golden Path, Bene Gesserit Archives
%
Ten thousand years since Leto II began his metamorphosis from human into the
sandworm of Rakis and historians still argue over his motives. Was he
driven by the desire for long life? He lived more than ten times the normal
span of three hundred SY, but consider the price he paid. Was it the lure
of power? He is called the Tyrant for good reason but what did power bring
him that a human might want? Was he driven to save humankind from itself?
We have only his own words about his Golden Path to answer this and I cannot
accept the self-serving records of Dar-es-Balat. Might there have been
other gratifications, which only his experiences would illuminate? Without
better evidence the question is moot. We are reduced to saying only that
"He did it!" The physical fact alone is undeniable.
-- The Metamorphosis of Leto II, 10,000th Anniversary Peroration by Gaus Andaud
%
Technology, in common with many other activities, tends toward avoidance of
risks by investors. Uncertainty is ruled out if possible. Capital
investment follows this rule, since people generally prefer the predictable.
Few recognize how destructive this can be, how it imposes severe limits on
variability and thus makes whole populations fatally vulnerable to the
shocking ways our universe can throw the dice.
-- Assessment of Ix, Bene Gesserit Archives
%
In my estimation, more misery has been created by reformers than by any
other force in human history. Show me someone who says "Something must be
done!" and I will show you a head full of vicious intentions that have no
other outlet. What we must strive for always! is to find the natural flow
and go with it.
-- The Reverend Mother Taraza, Conversational Record, BG File GSXXMAT9
%
The Tleilaxu secret must be in their sperm. Our tests prove that their
sperm does not carry forward in a straight genetic fashion. Gaps occur.
Every Tleilaxu we have examined has hidden his inner self from us. They are
naturally immune to an Ixian Probe! Secrecy at the deepest levels, that is
their ultimate armor and their ultimate weapon.
-- Bene Gesserit Analysis, Archives Code: BTXX441WOR
%
The outer surface of a balloon is always larger than the center of the
damned thing! That's the whole point of the Scattering!
-- Bene Gesserit response to an Ixian suggestion that new
investigative probes be sent out among the Lost Ones
%
The failure of CHOAM? Quite simple: They ignore the fact that larger
commercial powers wait at the edges of their activities, powers that could
swallow them the way a slig swallows garbage. This is the true threat of
the Scattering -- to them and to us all.
-- Bene Gesserit Council notes, Archives #SXX90CH
%
At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place,
predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers.
Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of
a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play.
For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you
believe is a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily
events. If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief
structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order.
-- Analysis of the Tyrant, the Taraza File: BG Archives
%
Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent mutual
regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it.
-- Chenoeh: "Conversations with Leto II"
%
Law always chooses sides on the basis of enforcement power. Morality and
legal niceties have little to do with it when the real question is: Who has
the clout?
-- Bene Gesserit Council Proceedings: Archives #XOX232
%
The basic rule is this: Never support weakness; always support strength.
-- The Bene Gesserit Coda
%
Nothing surpasses the complexity of the human mind.
-- Leto II: Dar-es-Balat Records
%
The significant fact is this: No Bene Tleilax female has ever been seen
away from the protection of their core planets. (Face Dancer mules who
simulate females do not count in this analysis. They cannot be breeders.)
The Tleilaxu sequester their females to keep them from our hands. This is
our primary deduction. It must also be in the eggs that the Tleilaxu
Masters conceal their most essential secrets.
-- Bene Gesserit Analysis -- Archives #XOXTM99 ..... 041
%
What social inheritances went outward with the Scattering? We know those
times intimately. We know both the mental and physical settings. The Lost
Ones took with them a consciousness confined mostly to manpower and
hardware. There was a desperate need for room to expand driven by the myth
of Freedom. Most had not learned the deeper lesson of the Tyrant, that
violence builds its own limits. The Scattering was wild and random movement
interpreted as growth (expansion). It was goaded by a profound fear (often
unconscious) of stagnation and death.
-- The Scattering: Bene Gesserit Analysis (Archives)
%
Liberty and Freedom are complex concepts. They go back to religious ideas
of Free Will and are related to the Ruler Mystique implicit in absolute
monarchs. Without absolute monarchs patterned after the Old Gods and ruling
by the grace of a belief in religious indulgence, Liberty and Freedom would
never have gained their present meaning. These ideals owe their very
existence to past examples of oppression. And the forces that maintain such
ideas will erode unless renewed by dramatic teaching or new oppressions.
This is the most basic key to my life.
-- Leto II, God Emperor of Dune: Dar-es-Balat Records
%
Quite naturally, holders of power wish to suppress wild research.
Unrestricted questing after knowledge has a long history of producing
unwanted competition. The powerful want a "safe line of investigations,"
which will develop only those products and ideas that can be controlled and,
most important, that will allow the larger part of the benefits to be
captured by inside investors. Unfortunately, a random universe full of
relative variables does not insure such a "safe line of investigations."
-- Assessment of Ix, Bene Gesserit Archives
%
Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more
than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the
old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look
inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?
-- A Guide to Trial and Error in Government, Bene Gesserit Archives
%
The long table on the right is set for a banquet of roast desert hare in
sauce cepeda. The other dishes, clockwise to the right from the far end of
the table, are aplomage sirian, chukka under glass, coffee with melange
(note the hawk crest of the Atreides on the urn), pot-a-oie and, in the
Balut crystal bottle, sparkling Caladan wine. Note the ancient poison
detector concealed in the chandelier.
-- Dar-es-Balat, Description at a Museum Display
%
People always want something more than immediate joy or that deeper sense
called happiness. This is one of the secrets by which we shape the
fulfillment of our designs. The something more assumes amplified power with
people who cannot give it a name or who (most often the case) do not even
suspect its existence. Most people only react unconsciously to such hidden
forces. Thus, we have only to call a calculated something more into
existence, define it and give it shape, then people will follow.
-- Leadership Secrets of the Bene Gesserit
%
There was this drylander who was asked which was more important, a literjon
of water or a vast pool of water? The drylander thought a moment and then
said: "The literjon is more important. No single person could own a great
pool of water. But a literjon you could hide under your cloak and run away
with it. No one would know."
-- The Jokes of Ancient Dune, Bene Gesserit Archives
%
By your belief in singularities, in granular absolutes, you deny movement,
even the movement of evolution! While you cause a granular universe to
persist in your awareness, you are blind to movement. When things change,
your absolute universe vanishes, no longer accessible to your self-limiting
perceptions. The universe has moved beyond you.
-- First Draft, Atreides Manifesto, Bene Gesserit Archives
%
We have long known that the objects of our palpable sense experiences can be
influenced by choice -- both conscious choice and unconscious. This is a
demonstrated fact that does not require that we believe some force within us
reaches out and touches the universe. I address a pragmatic relationship
between belief and what we identify as "real." All of our judgments carry a
heavy burden of ancestral beliefs to which we of the Bene Gesserit tend to
be more susceptible than most. It is not enough that we are aware of this
and guard against it. Alternative interpretations must always receive our
attention.
-- Mother Superior Taraza: Argument in Council
%
This is the awe-inspiring universe of magic: There are no atoms, only waves
and motions all around. Here, you discard all belief in barriers to
understanding. You put aside understanding itself. This universe cannot be
seen, cannot be heard, cannot be detected in any way by fixed perceptions.
It is the ultimate void where no preordained screens occur upon which forms
may be projected. You have only one awareness here -- the screen of the
magi: Imagination! Here, you learn what it is to be human. You are a
creator of order, of beautiful shapes and systems, an organizer of chaos.
-- The Atreides Manifesto, Bene Gesserit Archives
%
This room reconstructs a bit of the desert of Dune. The sandcrawler
directly in front of you dates from the Atreides times. Grouped around it,
moving clockwise from your left, are a small harvester, a carryall, a
primitive spice factory and the other support equipment. All are explained
at each station. Note the illuminated quotation above the display: "FOR
THEY SHALL SUCK OF THE ABUNDANCE OF THE SEAS AND OF THE TREASURE IN THE
SAND." This ancient religious quotation was oft repeated by the famous
Gurney Halleck.
-- Guide Announcement, Museum of Dar-es-Balat
%
Our fathers ate manna in the desert,
In the burning place where whirlwinds came.
Lord, save us from that horrible land!
Save us, oh-h-h-h-h save us
From that dry and thirsty land.
-- Songs of Gurney Halleck, Museum of Dar-es-Balat
%
All organized religions face a common problem, a tender spot through which we
may enter and shift them to our designs: How do they distinguish hubris from
revelation?
-- Missionaria Protectiva, the Inner Teachings
%
I remember friends from wars all but we forgot.
All of them distilled into each wound we caught.
Those wounds are all the painful places where we fought.
Battles better left behind, ones we never sought.
What is it that we spent and what was it we bought?
-- Songs of the Scattering
%
It is your fate, forgetfulness. All of the old lessons of life, you lose and
gain and lose and gain again.
-- Leto II, the Voice of Dar-es-Balat
%
Survival of self, of species, and of environment, these are what drive
humans. You can observe how the order of importance changes in a lifetime.
What are the things of immediate concern at a given age? Weather? The
state of the digestion? Does she (or he) really care? All of those various
hungers that flesh can sense and hope to satisfy. What else could possibly
matter?
-- Leto II to Hwi Noree, His Voice: Dar-es-Balat
%
There was a man who sat each day looking out through a narrow vertical
opening where a single board had been removed from a tall wooden fence.
Each day a wild ass of the desert passed outside the fence and across the
narrow opening -- first the nose, then the head, the forelegs, the long
brown back, the hindlegs, and lastly the tail. One day, the man leaped to
his feet with the light of discovery in his eyes and he shouted for all who
could hear him: "It is obvious! The nose causes the tail!"
-- Stories of the Hidden Wisdom, from the Oral History of Rakis
%
Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the
past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the
future as well.
-- Leto II, His Voice, from Dar-es-Balat
%
"I must rule with eye and claw -- as the hawk among lesser birds."
-- Atreides assertion (Ref: BG Archives)
%
Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions
change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably
fall short.
-- Mentat Handbook
%
Concealed behind strong barriers the heart becomes ice.
-- Darwi Odrade, Argument in Council
%
When strangers meet, great allowance should be made for differences of custom
and training.
-- The Lady Jessica, from "Wisdom of Arrakis"
%
May you die on Caladan!
-- Ancient Drinking Toast
%
The worst potential competition for any organism can come from its own kind.
The species consumes necessities. Growth is limited by that necessity which
is present in the least amount. The least favorable condition controls the
rate of growth. (Law of the Minimum)
-- From "Lessons of Arrakis"
%
O you who know what we suffer here, do not forget us in your prayers.
-- Sign over Arrakeen Landing Field (Historical Records: Dar-es-Balat)
%
The world is for the living. Who are they?
We dared the dark to reach the white and warm.
She was the wind when the wind was in my way.
Alive at noon, I perished in her form.
Who rise from the flesh to spirit know the fall:
The word outleaps the world and light is all.
-- Theodore Roethke (Historical Quotations: Dar-es-Balat)
%
Justice? Who asks for justice. We make our own justice. We make it here on
Arrakis -- win or die. Let us not rail about justice as long as we have arms
and the freedom to use them.
-- Leto I: Bene Gesserit Archives
%
We are not looking at a new state of matter but at a newly recognized
relationship between consciousness and matter, which provides a more
penetrating insight into the workings of prescience. The oracle shapes a
projected inner universe to produce new external probabilities out of forces
that are not understood. There is no need to understand these forces before
using them to shape the physical universe. Ancient metal workers had no
need to understand the molecular and submolecular complexities of their
steel, bronze, copper, gold, and tin. They invented mystical powers to
describe the unknown while they continued to operate their forges and wield
their hammers.
-- Mother Superior Taraza, Argument in Council
%

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Melange is the financial crux of CHOAM activities. Without this spice,
Bene Gesserit Reverend Mothers could not perform feats of observation and
human control, Guild Navigators could not see safe pathways across space,
and billions of Imperial citizens would die of addictive withdrawal.
Any simpleton knows that such dependence upon a single commodity
leads to abuse. We are all at risk.
-- CHOAM Economic Analysis of Materiel Flow Patterns
%
We are generalists. You can't draw neat
lines around planetwide problems.
Planetology is a cut-and-fit science.
-- PARDOT KYNES, Treatise on the Environmental Recovery
of Post-Holocaust Salusa Secundus
%
Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.
-- Chief commandment resulting from the Butlerian Jihad,
found in the Orange Catholic Bible
%
Spacing Guild: one leg of the political tripod maintaining the Great
Convention. The Guild was the second mental-physical training school
(see Bene Gesserit) after the Butlerian Jihad. The Guild monopoly on
space travel and transport and upon international banking is taken as
the beginning point of the Imperial Calendar.
-- Terminology of the Imperium
%
The highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.
-- PARDOT KYNES, Ecology of Bela Tegeuse, Initial Report to the Imperium
%
One observes the survivors, and learns from them.
-- Bene Gesserit Teaching
%
The populace must think their ruler is a greater man than they,
else why should they follow him? Above all a leader must be a showman,
giving his people the bread and circuses they require.
-- DUKE PAULUS ATREIDES
%
N'kee: Slow-acting poison that builds up in the adrenal glands; one of the
most insidious toxins permitted under the accords of Guild Peace and the
restrictions of the Great Convention. (See War of Assassins.)
-- The Assassins' Handbook
%
Kwisatz Haderach: "Shortening of the Way." This is the label applied by
the Bene Gesserit to the unknown for which they sought a genetic solution:
a male Bene Gesserit whose organic mental powers would bridge space and time.
-- Terminology of the Imperium
%
In response to the strict Butlerian taboo against machines that perform mental
functions, a number of schools developed enhanced human beings to subsume most
of the functions formerly performed by computers. Some of the key schools
arising out of the Jihad include the Bene Gesserit, with their intense mental
and physical training, the Spacing Guild, with the prescient ability to find a
safe path through foldspace, and the Mentats, whose computerlike minds are
capable of extraordinary acts of reasoning.
-- Ikbhan's Treatise on the Mind, Volume I
%
The paintbrush of history has depicted Abulurd Harkonnen in a most unfavorable
light. Judged by the standards of his older half brother, Baron Vladimir, and
his own children Glossu Rabban and Feyd-Rautha Rabban, Abulurd was a different
sort of man entirely. We must, however, assess the frequent descriptions of
his weakness, incompetence, and foolhardy decisions in light of the ultimate
failure of House Harkonnen. Though exiled to Lankiveil and stripped of any
real power, Abulurd secured a victory unmatched by anyone else in his extended
family: He learned how to be happy with his life.
-- Landsraad Encyclopedia of Great Houses, post-Jihad edition
%
Four things cannot be hidden -- Love, smoke, a pillar of fire,
and a man striding across the open bled.
-- Fremen Wisdom
%
Who can know whether Ix has gone too far? They hide their facilities,
keep their workers enslaved, and claim the right of secrecy.
Under such circumstances, how can they not be tempted to step
beyond the restrictions of the Butlerian Jihad?
-- COUNT ILBAN RICHESE, third appeal to the Landsraad
%
There are weapons you cannot hold in your hand.
You can only hold them in your mind.
-- Bene Gesserit Teaching
%
The basic rule is this: Never support weakness; always support strength.
-- The Bene Gesserit Azhar Book, Compilation of Great Secrets
%
Many elements of the Imperium believe they hold the ultimate power: the
Spacing Guild with their monopoly on interstellar travel, CHOAM with its
economic stranglehold, the Bene Gesserit with their secrets, the Mentats with
their control of mental processes, House Corrino with their throne, the Great
and Minor Houses of the Landsraad with their extensive holdings. Woe to us on
the day that one of those factions decides to prove the point.
-- COUNT HASIMIR FENRING, Dispatches from Arrakis
%
The slave concubines permitted my father under the Bene Gesserit-Guild
agreement could not, of course, bear a Royal Successor, but the intrigues were
constant and oppressive in their similarity. We became adept, my mother and
sisters and I, at avoiding subtle instruments of death.
-- From "In My Father's House" by the Princess Irulan
%
The working Planetologist has access to many resources, data, and projections.
However, his most important tools are human beings. Only by cultivating
ecological literacy among the people themselves can he save an entire planet.
-- PARDOT KYNES, The Case for Bela Tegeuse
%
It's easier to be terrified by an enemy you admire.
-- THUFIR HAWAT, Mentat and Security Commander to House Atreides
%
We consider the various worlds as gene pools, sources of teachings and
teachers, sources of the possible.
-- Bene Gesserit Analysis, Wallach IX Archives
%
Many inventions have selectively improved particular skills or abilities,
emphasizing one aspect or another. But no achievement has ever scratched
the complexity or adaptability of the human mind.
-- Ikbhan's Treatise on the Mind, Volume II
%
We must do a thing on Arrakis never before attempted for an entire planet.
We must use man as a constructive ecological force -- inserting adapted
terraform life: a plant here, an animal there, a man in that place --
to transform the water cycle, to build a new kind of landscape.
-- Report from Imperial Planetologist PARDOT KYNES,
directed to Padishah EMPEROR ELROOD IX (unsent)
%
My Father had only one real friend, I think. That was Count Hasimir Fenring,
the genetic-eunuch and one of the deadliest fighters in the Imperium.
-- From "In My Father's House" by the Princess Irulan
%
Blindness can take many forms other than the inability to see.
Fanatics are often blinded in their thoughts.
Leaders are often blinded in their hearts.
-- The Orange Catholic Bible
%
Hope can be the greatest weapon of a downtrodden people,
or the greatest enemy of those who are about to fail.
We must remain aware of its advantages and its limitations.
-- LADY HELENA ATREIDES, her personal journals
%
History allows us to see the obvious -- but unfortunately,
not until it is too late.
-- PRINCE RAPHAEL CORRINO
%
Like the knowledge of your own being, the sietch forms a firm base
from which you move out into the world and into the universe.
-- Fremen Teaching
%
Two hundred thirty-eight planets searched, many of only marginal habitability.
(See star charts attached in separate file.) Resource surveys list valuable
raw materials. Many of these planets deserve a second look, either for
mineral exploitation or possible colonization. As in previous reports,
however, no spice found.
-- Independent scout survey, third expedition,
delivered to EMPEROR FONDIL CORRINO III
%
The Spacing Guild has worked for centuries to surround our elite Navigators
with mystique. They are revered, from the lowest Pilot to the most talented
Steersman. They live in tanks of spice gas, see all paths through space and
time, guide ships to the far reaches of the Imperium. But no one knows the
human cost of becoming a Navigator. We must keep this a secret, for if they
really knew the truth, they would pity us.
-- Spacing Guild Training Manual Handbook for Steersmen (Classified)
%
The human body is a machine, a system of organic chemicals, fluid conduits,
electrical impulses; a government is likewise a machine of interacting
societies, laws, cultures, rewards and punishments, patterns of behavior.
Ultimately, the universe itself is a machine, planets around suns, stars
gathered into clusters, clusters and other suns forming entire galaxies . . . .
Our job is to keep the machinery functioning.
-- Suk Inner School, Primary Doctrine
%
The leaders of the Butlerian Jihad did not adequately define artificial
intelligence, failing to foresee all possibilities of an imaginative society.
Therefore, we have substantial gray areas in which to maneuver.
-- Confidential Ixian Legal Opinion
%
No outsider has ever seen a Tleilaxu female and lived to tell about it.
Considering the Tleilaxu penchant for genetic manipulation -- see, e.g.,
related memos on clones and gholas -- this simple observation raises a
wealth of additional questions.
-- Bene Gesserit Analysis
%
Like many culinary delicacies, revenge is a dish best savored slowly,
after long and delicate preparation.
-- EMPEROR ELROOD IX, Deathbed Insights
%
In the Imperium there exists the "principle of the individual," noble but
rarely utilized, whereby a person who violates a written law in a situation
of extreme peril or need can request a special session of the court of
jurisdiction in order to explain and support the necessity of his actions.
A number of legal procedures derive from this principle, among them the Drey
Jury, the Blind Tribunal, and the Trial by Forfeiture.
-- Law of the Imperium: Commentaries
%
Even the poorest House can be rich in loyalty. Allegiance that must be
purchased by bribes or wages is hollow and flawed, and could break at the worst
possible moment. Allegiance that comes from the heart, though, is stronger
than adamantium and more valuable than purest melange.
-- DUKE PAULUS ATREIDES
%
Only God can make living, sentient creatures.
-- The Orange Catholic Bible
%
Without a goal, a life is nothing. Sometimes the goal becomes a man's entire
life, an all-consuming passion. But once that goal is achieved, what then?
Oh, poor man, what then?
-- LADY HELENA ATREIDES, her personal journals
%
History has seldom been good to those who must be punished.
Bene Gesserit punishments cannot be forgotten.
-- Bene Gesserit Dictum
%
How simple things were when our Messiah was only a dream.
-- STILGAR, Naib of Sietch Tabr
%
The haughty do but build castle walls behind which they seek to hide their
doubts and fears.
-- Bene Gesserit Axiom
%
Any path that narrows future possibilities may become a lethal trap.
Humans do not thread their way through a maze; they scan a vast
horizon filled with unique opportunities.
-- The Spacing Guild Handbook
%
Perceptions rule the universe.
-- Bene Gesserit Saying
%
You of fearful heart, be strong and fear not. Behold, your God will come with
a vengeance; He will come and save you from the worshipers of machines.
-- The Orange Catholic Bible
%
Man is but a pebble dropped in a pool.
And if man is but a pebble, then
all his works can be no more.
-- Zensunni Saying
%
Among the responsibilities of command is the necessity to punish . . .
but only when the victim demands it.
-- PRINCE RAPHAEL CORRINO, Discourses on Leadership in a Galactic Imperium,
12th Edition
%
Speak the truth. That is always much easier,
and is often the most powerful argument.
-- Bene Gesserit Axiom
%
Imperfections, if viewed in the proper light, can be extremely valuable.
The Great Schools, with their incessant questing for perfection, often
find this postulate difficult to understand, until it is proven to them
that nothing in the universe is random.
-- From The Philosophies of Old Terra, one of the recovered manuscripts
%
One who rules assumes irrevocable responsibility for the ruled.
You are a husbandman. This demands, at times, a selfless act of
love which may be amusing only to those you rule.
-- DUKE PAULUS ATREIDES
%
Machine-vaccine principle: Every technological device contains
within it the tools of its opposite, and of its own destruction.
-- GIAN KANA, Imperial Patent Czar
%
The ultimate question: Why does life exist?
The answer: For life's sake.
-- ANONYMOUS, thought to be of Zensunni origin
%
The surest way to keep a secret is to make
people believe they already know the answer.
-- Ancient Fremen Wisdom
%
Hatred is as dangerous an emotion as love. The capacity for either one is the
capacity for its opposite.
-- Cautionary Instructions for the Sisterhood, Bene Gesserit Archives, Wallach IX
%
I must rule with eye and claw -- as the hawk among lesser birds.
-- DUKE PAULUS ATREIDES, The Atreides Assertion
%
In adverse circumstances, every creature becomes something else, evolving or
devolving. What makes us human is that we know what we once were, and --
let us hope -- we remember how to change back.
-- AMBASSADOR CAMMAR PILRU, Dispatches in Defense of Ix
%
We all live in the shadows of our predecessors for a time. But we who
determine the fate of planets eventually reach the point at which we
become not the shadows, but the light itself.
-- PRINCE RAPHAEL CORRINO, Discourses on Leadership
%
History demonstrates that the advancement of technology is not a steady upward
curve. There are flat periods, upward spurts, and even reversals.
-- Technology of the Imperium, 532nd Edition
%
Memory and History are two sides of the same coin. In time, however, History
tends to slant itself toward a favorable impression of events, while Memory is
doomed to preserve the worst aspects.
-- LADY HELENA ATREIDES, her personal journals
%
What senses do we lack that we cannot see or hear another world all around us?
-- The Orange Catholic Bible
%
No one but a Tleilaxu may set foot in Bandalong, holiest city of the Bene
Tleilax, for it is fanatically guarded hallowed ground, purified by their God.
-- Diplomacy in the Imperium, a Landsraad publication
%
Our timetable will achieve the stature of a natural phenomenon. A planet's
life is a vast, tightly interwoven fabric. Vegetation and animal changes
will be determined at first by the raw physical forces we manipulate.
As they establish themselves, though, our changes will become controlling
influences in their own right -- and we will have to deal with them, too.
Keep in mind, though, that we need control only three percent of the energy
surface -- only three percent -- to tip the entire structure over into our
self-sustaining system.
-- PARDOT KYNES, Arrakis Dreams
%
Even innocents carry within them their own guilt in their own way.
No one makes it through life without paying, in one fashion or another.
-- LADY HELENA ATREIDES, her personal journals
%
Innovations seem to have a life and a sentience of their own. When conditions
are right, a radical new idea -- a paradigm shift -- may appear simultaneously
from many minds at once. Or it may remain secret in the thoughts of one man
for years, decades, centuries . . . until someone else thinks of the same
thing. How many brilliant discoveries die stillborn, or lie dormant,
never to be embraced by the Imperium as a whole?
-- OMBUDSMEN OF RICHESE, Rebuttal to the Landsraad, The True Domain
of the Intellect -- Private Property, or Resources for the Galaxy?
%
They demonstrate subtle, highly effective skills in the aligned arts of
observation and data collection. Information is their stock-in-trade.
-- Imperial Report on the Bene Gesserit, used for tutoring purposes
%
When the center of the storm does not move, you are in its path.
-- Ancient Fremen Wisdom
%
Storms beget storms. Rage begets rage.
Revenge begets revenge. Wars beget wars.
-- Bene Gesserit Conundrum
%
Tio Holtzman was one of the most productive Ixian inventors on record.
He often went on creative binges, locking himself up for months on end
so that he could work without interruption. Sometimes upon emerging he
required hospitalization, and there were constant concerns over his
sanity and well-being. Holtzman died young -- barely past thirty Standard
Years -- but the results of his efforts changed the galaxy forever.
-- Biographical Capsules, an Imperial filmbook
%
In the long history of our House, we have been constantly shadowed by
Misfortune, as if we were its prey. One might almost believe the curse
of Atreus from ancient Greek times on Old Terra.
-- DUKE PAULUS ATREIDES, from a speech to his generals
%
Truth is a chameleon.
-- Zensunni Aphorism
%
In a Trial by Forfeiture, the normal rules of evidence do not apply. There are
no disclosure requirements that evidence be revealed to the opposition or to
the magistrates prior to the court proceedings. This places the person with
secret knowledge in a uniquely powerful position -- commensurate with the
extreme risk he takes.
-- Rogan's Rules of Evidence, 3rd Edition
%
The written Law of the Imperium cannot be changed, no matter which Great House
holds dominion or which Emperor sits on the Golden Lion Throne. The documents
of the Imperial Constitution have been established for thousands of years.
This is not to say that each regime is legally identical; the variations stem
from subtleties of interpretation and from microscopic loopholes that become
large enough to drive a Heighliner through.
-- Law of the Imperium: Commentaries and Rebuttals
%
The worst sort of alliances are those which weaken us. Worse still is
when an Emperor fails to recognize such an alliance for what it is.
-- PRINCE RAPHAEL CORRINO, Discourses on Leadership
%
The worst sort of protection is confidence. The best defense is suspicion.
-- HASIMIR FENRING
%
As seen from orbit, the world of Ix is pristine and placid. But beneath
its surface, immense projects are undertaken and great works are achieved.
In this way, our planet is a metaphor for the Imperium itself.
-- DOMINIC VERNIUS, The Secret Workings of Ix
%
When faced with necessary actions, there are always choices. So long as the
job gets done.
-- COUNT HASIMIR FENRING, Dispatches from Arrakis
%
In plotting any course of revenge, one must savor the anticipation phase
and all its moments, for the actual execution often differs widely from the
original plan.
-- HASIMIR FENRING, Dispatches from Arrakis
%
What matters more, the form of justice or the actual outcome? No matter how a
court may dissect the evidence, the foundation of genuine truth remains
unblemished. Unfortunately for many of the accused, such genuine truth is
often known only to the victim and the perpetrator. All others must make up
their own minds.
-- Landsraad Law, codicils and analyses
%
We do what we must. Friendship and loyalty be damned. We do what we must!
-- LADY HELENA ATREIDES,
her personal journals
%
All persons are contained within a single individual, just as all time is in a
moment, and the entire universe is in a grain of sand.
-- Fremen Saying
%
In the final analysis, the legendary event called Leto's Gambit became the
basis of the young Duke Atreides's immense popularity. He successfully
projected himself as a shining beacon of honor in a galactic sea of darkness.
To many members of the Landsraad, Leto's honesty and naivete became a symbol of
honor that shamed many of the Great and Minor Houses to alter their behavior
toward each other . . . for a short time, at least, until familiar old patterns
reemerged.
-- Origins of House Atreides: Seeds of the Future in the Galactic Imperium,
by Bronso of Ix
%
The universe contains untapped and heretofore unimagined energy sources.
They are before your very eyes, yet you cannot see them.
They are in your mind, yet you cannot think them. But I can!
-- TIO HOLTZMAN, Collected Lectures
%
Only fools leave witnesses.
-- HASIMIR FENRING
%
Progress and profit require a substantial investment in personnel, equipment,
and capital funding. However, the resource most often overlooked, yet which
can often provide the greatest payoff, is an investment in time.
-- DOMINIC VERNIUS, The Secret Workings of Ix
%
A world is supported by four things: the teaming of the wise, the justice
of the great, the prayers of the righteous, and the valor of the brave.
But all of these are as nothing without a ruler who knows the art of ruling.
-- PRINCE RAPHAEL CORRINO, Discourses on Galactic Leadership
%
A requirement of creativity is that it contributes to change.
Creativity keeps the creator alive.
-- FRANK HERBERT, unpublished notes
%

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Discovery is dangerous . . . but so is life.
A man unwilling to take risk is doomed
never to learn, never to grow, never to live.
-- PLANETOLOGIST PARDOT KYNES, An Arrakis Primer, written for his son Liet
%
Behold, O Man, you can create life. You can destroy life.
But, lo, you have no choice but to experience life.
And therein lies both your greatest strength and
your greatest weakness.
-- Orange Catholic Bible, Book of Kimla Septima, 5:3
%
Secrets are an important aspect of power.
The effective leader spreads them in
order to keep men in line.
-- PRINCE RAPHAEL CORRINO, Discourses on Leadership
in a Galactic Imperium, Twelfth Edition
%
In the days of Old Terra there were experts in poisons, deviously clever
persons who dealt in what were known as "the powders of inheritance."
-- Filmbook excerpt, Royal Library of Kaitain
%
It is said that there is nothing firm, nothing balanced, nothing durable in all
the universe -- that nothing remains in its original state, that each day, each
hour, each moment, there is change.
-- Panoplia Propheticus of the Bene Gesserit
%
Nature commits no errors; right and wrong are human categories.
-- PARDOT KYNES, Arrakis Lectures
%
Before us, all methods of learning were tainted by instinct. Before us,
instinct-ridden researchers possessed a limited attention span -- often no
longer than a single lifetime. Projects stretching across fifty or more
generations never occurred to them. The concept of total muscle/nerve training
had not entered their awareness. We learned how to learn.
-- Bene Gesserit Azhar Book
%
"Xuttuh" is a word that means many things. Every Bene Tleilax knows it was the
name of the first Master. But just as that man was more than a mere mortal, so
there are depths and complexities in the appellation. Depending upon tone and
vocal inflection, "Xuttuh" can mean "hello" or "blessings be upon you." Or it
can constitute a prayer encompassed in a single word, as a devotee prepares to
die for the Great Belief. For such reasons, we have chosen this as our new
name for the conquered planet formerly known as Ix.
-- Tleilaxu Training Disk
%
A center for the coordination of rebellion can be mobile; it does not need to
be a permanent place where people meet.
-- CAMMAR PILRU, Ixian Ambassador in Exile: Treatise on the Downfall
of Unjust Governments
%
It is said that the Fremen has no conscience, having lost it in a burning
desire for revenge. This is foolish. Only the rawest primitive and the
sociopath have no conscience. The Fremen possesses a highly evolved worldview
centered on the welfare of his people. His sense of belonging to the community
is almost stronger than his sense of self. It is only to outsiders that these
desert dwellers seem brutish . . . just as outsiders appear to them.
-- PARDOT KYNES, The People of Arrakis
%
An empire built on power cannot attract the affections and loyalty that men
bestow willingly on a regime of ideas and beauty. Adorn your Grand Empire with
beauty, with culture.
-- From a speech by CROWN PRINCE RAPHAEL CORRINO: L'Institut de Kaitain Archives
%
Military victories are meaningless unless they reflect the wishes
of the populace. An Emperor exists only to clarify those wishes.
He executes the popular will, or his time is short.
-- Principium, Imperial Leadership Academy
%
Organizational structure is crucial to the success of a movement.
It is, as well, a prime target for attack.
-- CAMMAR PILRU, Ixian Ambassador in Exile: Treatise on the Downfall
of Unjust Governments
%
The universe is our picture. Only the immature imagine the cosmos to be what
they think it is.
-- SIGAN VISEE, First Head Instructor, Guild Navigator School
%
War is a form of organic behavior. The army is a means of survival for the
all-male group. The all-female group, on the other hand, is traditionally
religion-oriented. They are the keepers of sacred mysteries.
-- Bene Gesserit Teaching
%
What is this Love that so many speak of with such apparent familiarity?
Do they truly comprehend how unattainable it is? Are there not as many
definitions of Love as there are stars in the universe?
-- The Bene Gesserit Question Book
%
When you ask a question, do you truly want to know the answer, or are you
merely flaunting your power?
-- DMITRI HARKONNEN, Notes to My Sons
%
Some lies are easier to believe than the truth.
-- Orange Catholic Bible
%
The strictest limits are self-imposed.
-- FRIEDRE GINAZ, Philosophy of the Swordmaster
%
Special knowledge can be a terrible disadvantage if it leads you too far along
a path that you cannot explain anymore.
-- Mentat Admonition
%
Too much knowledge never makes for simple decisions.
-- CROWN PRINCE RAPHAEL CORRINO, Discourses on Leadership
%
The desert is a surgeon cutting away the skin to expose what is underneath.
-- Fremen Saying
%
The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth.
-- Bene Gesserit Precept
%
Religion is the emulation of the adult by the child. Religion is the
encystment of past beliefs: mythology, which is guesswork, the hidden
assumptions of trust in the universe, those pronouncements which men have made
in search of personal power . . . all mingled with shreds of enlightenment.
And always the ultimate unspoken commandment is "Thou shalt not question!"
But we do anyway. 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.
-- Credo of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood
%
Humiliation is a thing never forgotten.
-- REBEC of Ginaz
%
Learn to recognize the future the way a Steersman identifies
guiding stars and corrects the course of his vessel.
Learn from the past; never use it as an anchor.
-- SIGAN VISEE, First Head Instructor, Guild Navigator School
%
The Unknown surrounds us at any given moment. That is where we seek knowledge.
-- MOTHER SUPERIOR RAQUELLA BERTO-ANIRUL: Oratory Against Fear
%
Thinking, and the methods by which thoughts are communicated,
inevitably create a system permeated by illusions.
-- Zensunni Teaching
%
There is no reality -- only our own order imposed on everything.
-- Basic Bene Gesserit Dictum
%
Immobility is often mistaken for peace.
-- EMPEROR ELROOD CORRINO IX
%
To learn about this universe, one must embark on a course of discovery where
real dangers exist. Education cannot impart this discovery; it is not a thing
to be taught and used or put away. It has no goals. In our universe, we
consider goals to be end products, and they are deadly if one becomes fixated
on them.
-- FRIEDRE GINAZ, Philosophy of the Swordmaster
%
Never underestimate the power of the human mind to believe
what it wants to believe, no matter the conflicting evidence.
-- CAEDMON ERB, Politics and Reality
%
It is the Atreides way to be examples of honor for our children,
so that they may be the same for their own progeny.
-- DUKE LETO ATREIDES, First Speech to the Caladan Assembly
%
It is true that one may become rich through practicing evil, but the power of
Truth and Justice is that they endure . . . and that a man can say of them,
"They are a heritage from my father."
-- Fifth Dynasty (Old Terra) calendar: The Wisdom of Ptahhotep
%
A man who persists in stalking game in a place where there is none may wait
forever without finding any success. Persistence in search is not enough.
-- Zensunni Wisdom of the Wanderings
%
The effective ruler punishes opposition while rewarding assistance; he shifts
his forces in random fashion; he conceals major elements of his power; he sets
up a rhythm of counter movement that keeps opponents off balance.
-- WESTHEIMER ATREIDES, Elements of Leadership
%
The Universe operates on a basic principle of economics: everything has
its cost. We pay to create our future, we pay for the mistakes of the past.
We pay for every change we make . . . and we pay just as dearly if we
refuse to change.
-- Guild Bank Annals, Philosophical Register
%
The increasing variety and abundance of life itself vastly multiplies the
number of niches available for life. The resulting system is a web of makers
and users, eaters and eaten, collaborators and competitors.
-- PARDOT KYNES, Report to Emperor Shaddam IV
%
To know what one ought to do is not enough.
-- PRINCE RHOMBUR VERNIUS
%
Facts mean nothing when they are preempted by appearances.
Do not underestimate the power of impression over reality.
-- CROWN PRINCE RAPHAEL CORRINO, The Rudiments of Power
%
If you surrender, you have already lost. If you refuse to give up, though,
no matter the odds against you, at least you have succeeded in trying.
-- DUKE PAULUS ATREIDES
%
Dreams are as simple or as complicated as the dreamer.
-- LIET-KYNES, In the Footsteps of My Father
%
Water is the image of life. We came from water, adapted from its
all-encompassing presence . . . and we continue to adapt.
-- IMPERIAL PLANETOLOGIST PARDOT KYNES
%
I stand in the sacred human presence. As I do now, so should you stand some
day. I pray to your presence that this be so. Let the future remain uncertain
for that is the canvas to receive our desires. Thus the human condition faces
its perpetual tabula rasa. We possess no more than this moment where we
dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence we share and create.
-- Bene Gesserit Benediction
%
I fought in great wars to defend the Imperium and slew many men in the
Emperor's name. I attended Landsraad functions. I toured the continents of
Caladan. I managed all the tedious business matters required to run a Great
House. And still the best of times were those I spent with my son.
-- DUKE PAULUS ATREIDES
%
Body and mind are two phenomena, observed under different conditions, but of
one and the same ultimate reality. Body and mind are aspects of the living
being. They operate within a peculiar principle of synchronicity wherein
things happen together and behave as if they are the same . . . yet can be
conceived of as separate.
-- Staff Medical Manual, Ginaz School
%
The Universe is a place inaccessible, unintelligible, completely absurd . . .
from which life -- especially rational life -- is estranged. There is no place
of safety, or basic principle upon which the Universe depends. There are only
transitory, masked relationships, confined within limited dimensions, and bound
for inevitable change.
-- Meditations from Bifrost Eyrie, Buddislamic Text
%
The Bene Gesserit tell no casual lies. Truth serves us better.
-- BENE GESSERIT CODA
%
The man who gives in to adrenaline addiction turns against all humanity.
He turns against himself. He runs away from the workable issues of life and
admits a defeat which his own violent actions help to create.
-- CAMMAR PILRU, Ixian Ambassador in Exile: Treatise on the Downfall of Unjust
Governments
%
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments.
-- Bene Gesserit Axiom
%
Infinity attracts us like a floodlight in the night, blinding us to the
excesses it can inflict upon the finite.
-- Meditations from Bifrost Eyrie, Buddislamic Text
%
Love is the highest achievement to which any human may aspire.
It is an emotion that encompasses the full depth of heart, mind, and soul.
-- Zensunni Wisdom from the Wandering
%
It is possible to become intoxicated with rebellion for rebellion's sake.
-- DOMINIC VERNIUS, Ecaz Memoirs
%
What is each man but a memory for those who follow?
-- DUKE LETO ATREIDES
%
A man may fight the greatest enemy, take the longest journey, survive the most
grievous wound -- and still be helpless in the hands of the woman he loves.
-- Zensunni Wisdom from the Wandering
%
Political leaders often don't recognize the practical uses of imagination and
innovative new ideas until such forms are thrust under their noses by bloody
hands.
-- CROWN PRINCE RAPHAEL CORRINO, Discourses on Galactic Leadership
%
Enemies strengthen you; allies weaken.
-- EMPEROR ELROOD IX, Deathbed Insights
%
The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be
experienced.
-- Meditations from Bifrost Eyrie, Buddislamic Text
%
The work to which we have set ourselves is the liberating of the imagination,
and the harnessing of the imagination to man's physical creativity.
-- FRIEDRE GINAZ, Philosophy of the Swordmaster
%
Nature has moved inexplicably backward and forward to produce this marvelous,
subtle Spice. One is tempted to suggest that only divine intervention could
possibly have produced a substance which in one aspect extends human life and
in another opens the inner doors of the psyche to the wonders of Time and
Creation.
-- HIDAR FEN AJIDICA, Laboratory Notes on the Nature of Melange
%
Freedom is an elusive concept. Some men hold themselves prisoner even
when they have the power to do as they please and go where they choose,
while others are free in their hearts, even as shackles restrain them.
-- Zensunni Wisdom from the Wandering
%
Heaven must be the sound of running water.
-- Fremen Saying
%
Look inside yourself and you can see the universe.
-- Zensunni Aphorism
%
Unceasing warfare gives rise to its own social conditions, which have been
similar throughout the ages. One such condition is a permanent state of
alertness to ward off attack. Another is the rule of the autocrat.
-- CAMMAR PILRU, Ixian Ambassador in Exile: Treatise on the Downfall
of Unjust Governments
%
Beneath a world -- in its rocks, its dirt and sedimentary overlays --
there you find the planet's memory, the complete analog of its existence,
its ecological memory.
-- PARROT KYNES, An Arrakis Primer
%
A Duke must always take control of his household, for if he does not
rule those closest to him, he cannot hope to govern a planet.
-- DUKE PAULUS ATREIDES
%
We create our own future by our own beliefs, which control our actions.
A strong enough belief system, a sufficiently powerful conviction,
can make anything happen. This is how we create our consensus reality,
including our gods.
-- REVEREND MOTHER RAMALLO, Sayyadina of the Fremen
%
Challenge: Time?
Answer: A brilliant, many-faceted gem.
Challenge: Time?
Answer: A dark stone, reflecting no visible light.
-- Fremen wisdom, from The Riddle Game
%
It requires a desperate and lonely sort of courage to challenge the accepted
wisdom upon which social peace of mind rests.
-- CROWN PRINCE RAPHAEL CORRINO, In Defense of Change in the Face of Tradition
%
There is no such thing as a law of nature. There is only a series of laws
relating to man's practical experience with nature. These are laws of man's
activities. They change as man's activities change.
-- PARROT KYNES, An Arrakis Primer
%
One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp with too much force is to be
taken over by power, thus becoming its victim.
-- Bene Gesserit Axiom
%
No one has yet determined the power of the human species . . . what it may
perform by instinct, and what it may accomplish with rational determination.
-- Mentat Objective Analysis of Human Capabilities
%
Power and deceit are tools of statecraft, yes. But remember that power deludes
the ones who wield it -- making them believe it can overcome the defects of
their ignorance.
-- COUNT FLAMBERT MUTELLI, early speech in Landsraad Hall of Oratory
%
Never be in the company of anyone with whom you would not want to die.
-- Fremen Saying
%
If a man can accept his sin, he can live with it. If a man cannot accept
personal sin, he suffers unbearable consequences.
-- Meditations from Bifrost Eyrie, Buddislamic Text
%
The capacity to learn is a gift; The ability to learn is a skill; The
willingness to learn is a choice.
-- REBEC OF GINAZ
%
How to define the Kwisatz Haderach? The male who is everywhere simultaneously,
the only man who can truly become the greatest human of all of us, mingling
masculine and feminine ancestry with inseparable power.
-- Bene Gesserit Azhar Book
%
You carve wounds upon my flesh and write there in salt!
-- Fremen Lament
%
The stone is heavy and the sand weighty; but a fool's wrath is heavier than
them both.
-- DUKE LETO ATREIDES
%
Innovation and daring create heroes. Mindless adherence
to outdated rules creates only politicians.
-- VISCOUNT HUNDRO MORITANI
%
How easily grief becomes anger, and revenge gains arguments.
-- PADISHAH EMPEROR HASSIK III, Lament for Salusa Secundus
%
Paradise on my right, Hell on my left, and the Angel of Death behind me.
-- Fremen Conundrum
%
If God wishes thee to perish, He causes thy steps to
lead thee to the place of thy demise.
-- Cant of the Shariat
%
Treachery and quick-thinking will defeat hard-and-fast rules any day.
Why should we be afraid to seize the opportunities we see?
-- VISCOUNT HUNDRO MORITANI, Response to Landsraad Court Summons
%
All technology is suspect, and must be considered potentially dangerous.
-- BUTLERIAN JIHAD, Handbook for Our Grandchildren
%
The seats of power inevitably try to harness any new knowledge to their own
desires. But knowledge can have no fixed desires -- neither in the past nor in
the future.
-- DMITRI HARKONNEN, Lessons for My Sons
%
The haughty do but build castle walls behind which they try to hide their
doubts and fears.
-- Bene Gesserit Axiom
%
The individual is the key, the final effective unit of all biological processes.
-- PARDOT KYNES
%
Good leadership is largely invisible. When everything runs smoothly, no one
notices a Duke's work. That is why he must give the people something to cheer,
something to talk about, something to remember.
-- DUKE PAULUS ATREIDES
%
War, as the foremost ecological disaster of any age, merely reflects the larger
state of human affairs in which the total organism called "humanity" finds its
existence.
-- PARDOT KYNES, Reflections on the Disaster at Salusa Secundus
%
Beware the seeds you sow and the crops you reap. Do not curse God for the
punishment you inflict upon yourself.
-- Orange Catholic Bible
%
Every man dreams of the future, though not all of us will be there to see it.
-- TIO HOLTZMAN, Speculations on Time and Space
%
Knowledge is pitiless.
-- Orange Catholic Bible
%
The greatest and most important problems of life cannot be solved.
They can only be outgrown.
-- SISTER JESSICA, private journal entry
%
Why look for meaning where there is none?
Would you follow a path you know leads nowhere?
-- Query of the Mentat School
%
Humans must never submit to animals.
-- Bene Gesserit Teaching
%
To keep from dying is not the same as "to live."
-- Bene Gesserit Saying
%
We are always human and carry the whole burden of being human.
-- DUKE LETO ATREIDES
%
No one person can ever know everything that is in the heart of another.
We are all Face Dancers in our souls.
-- Tleilaxu Secret Handbook
%
We as humans tend to make pointless demands of our universe, asking meaningless
questions. Too often we make such queries after developing an expertise within
a frame of reference which has little or no relationship to the context in
which the question is asked.
-- Zensunni Observation
%
The ego is only a bit of consciousness swimming upon the ocean of dark things.
We are an enigma unto ourselves.
-- The Mentat Handbook
%
The individual is shocked by the overwhelming discovery of his own mortality.
The species, however, is different. It need not die.
-- PARDOT KYNES, An Arrakis Primer
%
The man faced with a life-and-death decision must commit himself,
or he will remain caught in the pendulum.
-- From "In My Father's House," by the Princess Irulan
%
Love is an ancient force, one that served its purpose in its day but is no
longer essential for the survival of the species.
-- Bene Gesserit Axiom
%
How will I be remembered by my children? This is the true measure of a man.
-- ABULURD HARKONNEN
%
Some say that the anticipation of a thing is better than the thing itself.
In my view, this is utter nonsense. Any fool can imagine a prize.
I desire the tangible.
-- HASIMIR FENRING, Letters from Arrakis
%
Though death will cancel it, life in this world is a glorious thing.
-- DUKE PAULUS ATREIDES
%

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