fortune-mod-dune/children-of-dune

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
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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
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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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