by I LOVE YOU
WISDOM OF DUNE
WISDOM OF DUNE
Alright, I love the Dune series. :-D I first read these as a teenager and have re-read them ever since, recommending them to everyone that loves to read. For an enquiring young mind, they were a source of a lot of knowledge for me at the age of twelve going on thirteen. They helped me to see how the system was set up, how the power structure maintained its hold on the population, introduced me to philosophical understandings, further opened up my imagination, and so much more. Frank Herbert is an absolute genius !!!
Feel free to pick out some quotes if you would love to discuss some of the ideas within the Dune series of books.
There is a link at the bottom of the post to get the series on PDF for free.
OFFICIAL WEBSITE
[website]http://www.dunenovels.com/[/website]
[website]http://www.duneinfo.com/kaitain/downloads.asp[/website]
DUNE - 1965
Frank Herbert
The winner of both the Hugo and Nebula award, this novel follows the journey of a young Paul Atreides and his journey on the desert planet of Arrakis. Arrakis is the most important planet in the universe as it is the only source of Melange, the spice that is required for space travel and extended life.
The story unfolds with a conspiracy between House Harkonnen and House Corrino to destroy House Atreides. The Harkonnens relinquish their assignment on Arrakis with the intention of taking it back with the aid of the Emperor's Sardaukar.
Through the aid of a spy within the Atreides house, Paul Atreides and his mother, Lady Jessica, are cast out into the deep desert to die. With the aid of the Fremen, Paul sets a plan into motion to reclaim his title. Along the way, Paul discovers that he may be the Kwisatz Haderach and sets out to discover his true potential.
QUOTES
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
-Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear.
That which submits rules.
-Bene Gesserit Axiom
The Mystery of Life is not a problem to sove, but a reality to experience.
- Revernd Mother Gaius Helen Mohaim
A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.
-First Law of Mentat
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
The struggle between life elements is the struggle for the free energy of a system.
-Liet Kynes, Planetologist
Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount.
-Bene Gesserit Axiom
Laboratory evidence tends to blind us to a very simple fact. That fact is this: we are dealing here with matters that originated and exist out-of-doors where plants and animals carry on their normal existence.
-Liet Kynes, Planetologist
Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.
-Fremen Saying
What do you despise? By this are you truly known.
-Paul Muad’Dib
The absence of a thing, this can be as deadly as the presence. The absence of air, eh? The absence of water? The absence of anything else we're addicted to.
-Baron Vladimir Harkonnen
A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and a people reverts to a mob.
-Stilgar
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
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
The eye that looks ahead to the safe course is closed forever.
-Muad’Dib
APPENDIX
Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.
-Pardot Kynes, First Planetologist of Arrakis
Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you've always known.
-O.C. Bible
DUNE MESSIAH - 1969
Frank Herbert
Dune Messiah is the sequel to Dune and more importantly a bridge to the next book. Paul's death is conspired between several characters including the princess Irulan, his wife, the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohaim, Scytale, a Tleilaxu Face Dancer and Edric, a Guild Steersman.
As part of their plot, Duncan Idaho is revived by the Tleilaxu as a ghola named Hayt to infiltrate Paul's confidence and set about his demise. Paul must decide who his allies are in this plot thick novel and also concern himself for the future of his children that Chani carries.
QUOTES
There exists no separation between gods and men: one blends softly casual into the other.
-Proverbs of Muad'dib
Reason is the first victim of strong emotion.
-Scytale
Constitutions become the ultimate tyranny. They're organized power on such a scale as to be overwhelming. The constitution is social power mobilized and it has no conscience. It can crush the highest and the lowest, removing all dignity and individuality. It has an unstable balance point and no limitations.
-Paul Muad’Dib
The cleansed mind makes decisions in the presence of
unknowns and without cause and effect.
-Hayt
Truth suffers from too much analysis.
-Ancient Fremen Saying
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
The wise man molds himself -- the fool lives only to die.
-Alia
To endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe.
-Hayt
Power deluded those who used it. One tended to believe power could overcome any barrier . . . including one's own ignorance.
Because we cannot imagine a thing, that doesn't exclude it from reality.
-Hayt
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
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
Forget mystery and accept love. There's no mystery about love. It comes from life.
-Paul Muad’Dib
CHILDREN OF DUNE - 1976
Frank Herbert
In the third novel of this epic a great change is taking place. The desert planet of Arrakis is becoming lush and fertile.
The children of Paul Atreides are growing up under the supervision of their aunt Alia and her husband Duncan. As Alia ages she falls further into abomination and Duncan fights to save her.
Meanwhile, a familiar figure known as the Preacher is seen in Arakeen. Is he the long thought dead Maud'dib? Paul's children Leto II and Ghanima set out to find the truth.
The new life emerging on Arakis is seen as a threat by the old Fremen, and the fate of the entire planet is in danger as Alia deals with her personal demons and the ultimate fate of her brother.
QUOTES
Failure to make a decision is in itself a decision.
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)
The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth.
-Bene Gesserit Precept
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
Most deadly errors arise from obsolete assumptions.
-Bene Gesserit Precept
Some actions have an end but no beginning; some begin but do not end. It all depends upon where the observer is standing.
-Leto II
It is said that there is nothing firm, nothing balanced, nothing durable in all the universe – that nothing remains in its state, that each day, some time each hour, brings change.
-Bene Gesserit Panoplia Prophetica
A large populace held in check by a small but powerful force is quite a common situation in our universe. And we know the major conditions wherein this large populace may turn upon its keepers --
One: When they find a leader. This is the most volatile threat to the powerful; they must retain control of leaders.
Two: When the populace recognizes its chains. Keep the populace blind and unquestioning.
Three: When the populace perceives a hope of escape from bondage. They must never even believe that escape is possible!
-Bene Gesserit Codice
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
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 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 sublanguages, 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
One learns from books and reels only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.
-Farad’n
I'm going to rub your faces in things you try to avoid. I don't find it strange that all you want to believe is only that which comforts you. How else do humans invent the traps which betray us into mediocrity? How else do we define cowardice?
-Muad’Dib
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
We survive in part by the complete confidence which people can have in our truthfulness.
-Lady Jessica
To learn patience in the Bene Gesserit Way, you must begin by recognizing the essential, raw instability of our universe. We call nature -- meaning this totality in all of its manifestations -- the Ultimate Non-Absolute.
-Lady Jessica
There's no single set of limits for all men. Universal prescience is an empty myth. Only the most powerful local currents of Time may be foretold. But in an infinite universe, local can be so gigantic that your mind shrinks from it.
-Leto II
Beware paths which narrow future possibilities. Such paths divert you from infinity into lethal traps.
-Leto II
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 of it mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always the ultimate unspoken commandment is 'Thou shall not question!' But we question. 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.
-Bene Gesserit Credo
Life is a mask through which the universe expresses itself.
-Lady Jessica
I stand in the sacred human presence. As I do now, so should you stand someday. I pray to your presence that this be so. The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires. Thus always the human condition faces a beautifully empty canvas. We possess only this moment in which to dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence which we share and create.
-Bene Gesserit Graduation Ceremony
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
Patterns could guide and they could trap. One had to remember that patterns change.
-Leto II
Languages build up to reflect specializations in a way of life. Each specialization may be recognized by its words, by its assumptions and sentence structures. Look for stoppages. Specializations represent places where life is being stopped, where the movement is dammed up and frozen.
-Bene Gesserit Teaching
It's an old, old trick of autocratic rule. Good subjects must feel guilty. The guilt begins as a feeling of failure. The good autocrat provides many opportunities for failure in the populace.
-Duncan Idaho
Anyone can be a Truthsayer. It's a matter of self-honesty about the nature of your own feelings. It requires that you have an inner agreement with truth which allows ready recognition.
-The Preacher
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
The only rule governing creativity is the act of creation itself.
-Leto II
GOD EMPORER OF DUNE - 1981
Frank Herbert
More than a thousand years after the events of Children of Dune, the desert planet has undergone startling changes. Now known as Rakis, the planet has become green with life with only a small area of desert left.
Within that desert lives the God Emperor, Leto Atreides II, now almost completely transformed into a sandworm. He has taken over the work of the Bene Gesserit, manipulating bloodlines to lead humanity down his Golden Path.
The focus of the Dune chronicles are clearly set as Duncan Idaho is destined to be reborn again and again to serve the God Emperor. The love of a woman and the heart of a warrior may lead to the end of Atreides rule over the universe.
QUOTES
All rebellions are ordinary and an ultimate bore. They are copied out of the same pattern, one much like another. The driving force is adrenalin addiction and the desire to gain personal power. All rebels are closet aristocrats.
-Leto II God Emporer
Radicals always see matters in terms which are too simple-black and white, good and evil, them and us. By addressing complex matters in that way, they rip open a passage for chaos. The art of government as you call it, is the mastery of chaos. Chaos is no surprise. It has predictable characteristics. For one thing, it carries away order and strengthens the forces at the extremes. Actually, they're creating new extremists, new radicals and they are continuing the old process.
-Leto II God Emporer
Laws tend to be temporary over the long haul. There is no such thing as rule-governed creativity. Trying to find rules for creation is like trying to separate mind from body. Rules change with each surprise.
-Leto II God Emporer
In the view of Infinity, any defined long-term is short-term. Short-term decisions tend to fail in the long-term. Time runs out for any finite observer. There are no closed systems.
-Leto II God Eporer
Hydraulic despotism is possible only when a substance or condition upon which life in general absolutely depends can be controlled by a relatively small and centralized force. This phenomenon has been repeated many times in human history.
-Bene Gesserit Report
How sure it is that a weapon can lock a person into a predictable pattern of behavior.
-Leto II God Emporer
No matter how much we ask after the truth, self-awareness is often unpleasant. We do not feel kindly toward the Truthsayer.
-Leto II God Emporer
Religion always leads to rhetorical despotism. This leads to self-fulfilling prophecy and justifications for all manner of obscenities. It shields evil behind walls of self-righteousness which are proof against all arguments against the evil. It feeds on deliberately twisted meanings to discredit opposition. It leads directly to hypocrisy which is always betrayed by the gap between actions and explanations. They never agree. Ultimately, it rules by guilt because hypocrisy brings on the witch hunt and the demand for scapegoats.
-Leto II God Emporer
Truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it.
-Leto II God Emporer
Beware of the truth. Although much sought after, truth can be dangerous to the seeker. Myths and reassuring lies are much easier to find and believe. If you find a truth, even a temporary one, it can demand that you make painful changes.
Leto II God Emporer
Words can carry any burden we wish. All that's required is agreement and a tradition upon which to build.
-Leto II God Emporer
Membership in a conspiracy, as in an army, frees people from the sense of personal responsibility. They believe that by risking death they pay the price of any violent behaviour against enemies of their own choosing. They have the invader mentality and do not believe themselves responsible for anything done against aliens. Militant missionary religions share this illusion, but few understand the ultimate peril to humankind - that false sense of freedom from responsibility for your own actions.
-Leto II God Emporer
That which exists cannot be made into itself for it already exists. To be is to be.
-Leto II God Emporer
Specialists are not to be trusted. Specialists are masters of exclusion, experts in the narrow.
Leto II God Emporer
An obscure truth is not the truth.
-Reverend Mother Anteac
Intelligence creates. That means you must deal with responses never before imagined. You must confront the new.
-Leto II God Emporer
I point out to you a lesson from past over-machined societies which you appear not to have learned. The devices themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines.
-Leto II God Emporer
Single purpose is the mark of the fanatic.
-Leto II God Emporer
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
The mind imposes this framework which it calls reality. That arbitrary framework has a tendency to be quite independent of what your senses report.
-Muad'Dib From the Oral History
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
The problem of leadership is inevitably: Who will play God?
-Muad'Dib From the Oral History
When you think you know something, that is a most perfect barrier against learning.
-Leto II God Emporer
Police always observe that criminals prosper. It takes a pretty dull policeman to miss the fact that the position of authority is the most prosperous criminal position available.
-Leto II God Emporer
The thing made known by its opposite stands out against a background which defines it.
-Leto II God Emporer
Religious institutions perpetuate a mortal master-servant relationship. They create an arena which attracts prideful human power-seekers with all of their nearsighted prejudices!
-Leto II God Emporer
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
Ignorance thrives on hysteria.
-Moneo
Argument closes off the doors of the senses. It always masks violence. Continued too long, argument always leads to violence.
-Leto II God Emporer
The three legs of the agreement-tripod are desire, data and doubt. Desire brings the participants together. Data set the limits of their dialogue. Doubt frames the questions.
-Leto II God Emporer
Small souls who seek power over others first destroy the faith those others might have in themselves.
-Leto II God Emporer
Each of us comes into being knowing who he is and what he is supposed to do. Small children know. It's only after adults have confused them that children hide this knowledge even from themselves.
-Leto II God Emporer
Every sense you possess is an instrument for reacting to change.
-Leto II God Emporer
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
You are God embodied. You walk around within the greatest miracle of this universe, yet you refuse to touch or see or feel or believe in it.
-Leto II God Emporer
If you want immortality, then deny form. Whatever has form has mortality. Beyond form is the formless, the immortal.
-Oral Histories
HERETICS OF DUNE - 1984
Frank Herbert
Heretics of Dune follows the story of the reborn Duncan Idaho and introduces Sheeana and Miles Teg. The world of Rakis has again become a baren world.
The rogue Bene Gesserit have evolved into the Honored Matres who have sexual abilities that unleash great powers. The Bene Gesserit still exist and have their own plan to create a new supreme being with the aid of a Tleiaxu axoltl tank.
It is a race to create the next Kwisatz Haderach and in the end, the final fate of Rakis is decided.
QUOTES
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
Has not religion claimed a patent on creation for all of these millennia?
-The Tleilaxu Question, from Muad'dib Speaks
The act of saying that things exist that cannot be described in words shakes a universe where words are the supreme belief.
-Waff
I can say God, but that is not my God. That is only a noise and no more potent than any other noise.
-Tleilaxu Pledge
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
Very few people realize how much of the infrastructure in a civilization is dependency infrastructure. Dependency infrastructure is a term that includes all things necessary for a human population to survive at existing or increased numbers.
-Reverend Mother Taraza
Food, water, breathable air, living space not contaminated by poisons - there are many kinds of money and the value changes according to the dependency.
-Miles Teg
Humans have such a powerful need that their own belief structure be the 'true belief.' If it gives you pleasure or a sense of security and if it is incorporated into your belief structure, what a powerful dependency that creates!
-Reverend Mother Taraza
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"
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
One of the most dangerous things in the universe is an ignorant people with real grievances. That is nowhere near as dangerous, however, as an informed and intelligent society with grievances.
-Miles Teg
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
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
Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.
-Mentat Handbook
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"
You may think of this only as sexuality but we prefer the more basic term: procreation. It has many facets and offshoots and it has apparently unlimited energy. The emotion called 'love' is only one small aspect. This energy must have an outlet. Bottle it up and it becomes monstrously dangerous. Redirect it and it will sweep over anything in its path. This is an ultimate secret of all religions.
-Bene Gesserit Teachings
The process of arranging conflicts involved the hoodwinking of large masses. Most people wanted to be
led. There were deep tribal instincts (powerful unconscious motivations) to account for this.
-Miles Teg
You seldom learn the names of the truly wealthy and powerful. You see only their spokesmen. The political arena makes a few exceptions to this but does not reveal the full power structure.
-Miles Teg
The writing of history is largely a process of diversion. Most historical accounts divert attention from the secret influences around the recorded events. The few histories that escape this restrictive process vanish into obscurity through obvious processes. Destruction of as many copies as possible, burying the too revealing accounts in ridicule, ignoring them in the centers of education, insuring that they are not quoted elsewhere and, in some cases, elimination of the authors.
-Miles Teg
CHAPTERHOUSE DUNE - 1985
Frank Herbert
Chapterhouse: Dune is the final book in this epic story. Rakis, the desert planet has been destroyed and Duncan Idaho is now living in a Bene Gesserit no-ship to keep his whereabouts secret. The Bene Gesserit have a plan to regain their place in the universe from the Honored Matres.
The Bene Gesserit capture a young Honored Matre and train her in the ways of the Bene Gesserit and learn the ways of the Honored Matres. The fate of the Bene Gesserits depend on what they can learn from the Honored Matres. And if Duncan Idaho can become a supreme being, what are the expectations for a reborn Miles Teg?
QUOTES
Those who would repeat the past must control the teaching of history.
-Bene Gesserit Coda
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
-Santayana
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
Life breeds more intensely when threatened.
-Revernd Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
Humans have this deep desire to classify, to apply labels to everything. That way we lay claim to what we name. We assume an ownership that can be misleading and dangerous. My street, my lake, my planet. My label forever.
-Revernd Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
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
Hey, God! I hope you're there.
I want you to hear my prayer.
That graven image on my shelf:
Is it really you or just myself?
Well, anyway, here it goes:
Please keep me on my toes.
Help me past my worst mistakes,
Doing it for both our sakes,
For an example of perfection
To the Proctors in my section;
Or merely for the Heaven of it,
Like bread, for the leaven of it.
For whatever reason may incline,
Please act for yours and mine.
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)
All of us are descendants of people who did nasty things, Rabbi. We don't like to think of barbarians in our ancestry but they're there. Remember, it is the victors who breed.
-Rebecca
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)
The cycle was getting another chance, turning once more as it was impelled to do by those subterranean forces called "life" and "love" and other unnecessary labels. Thus it turns. Thus it renews. Magic. What witchery could take your attention from this miracle?
-Revernd Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
Educational bureaucracies dull a child's questing sensitivity. The young must be damped down. Never let them know how good they can be. That brings change. Spend lots of committee time talking about how to deal with exceptional students. Don't spend any time dealing with how the conventional teacher feels threatened by emerging talents and squelches them because of a deep-seated desire to feel superior and safe in a safe environment.
-Revernd Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
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
There is no reality. Only our own order imposed on everything.
-Bene Gesserit Dictum
Democracy is susceptible to being led astray by having scapegoats paraded in front of the electorate. Get the rich, the greedy, the criminals, the stupid leader and so on ad nauseam. It's demagogue-prone. That's a disease to which electoral systems are vulnerable. Yet demagogues are easy to identify. They gesture a lot and speak with pulpit rhythms, using words that ring of religious fervor and godfearing sincerity.
-Reverend Mother Lucilla
Give me the judgment of balanced minds in preference to laws every time. Codesand manuals create patterned behavior. All patterned behavior tends to go unquestioned, gathering destructive momentum.
-Reverend Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
The self-important have limited vision because they ride a death-reality. Without life-reality there'd be no humankind.
-Duncan Idaho
Since every individual is accountable ultimately to the self, formation of that self demands the utmost care and attention.
-Miles Teg
Your habits always come hunting after you. The self you construct will haunt you. A ghost wandering around in search of your body, eager to possess you. We are addicted to the self we construct. Slaves to what we have done.
-Reverend Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
The tyranny of the minority cloaked in the mask of the majority. Downfall of democracy. Either overthrown by its own excesses or eaten away by bureaucracy.
-Reverend Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
Power attracts the corruptible. Absolute power attracts the absolutely corruptible. This is the danger of entrenched bureaucracy to its subject population. Even spoils systems are preferable because levels of tolerance are lower and the corrupt can be thrown out periodically. Entrenched bureaucracy seldom can be touched short of violence. Beware when Civil Service and Military join hands!
-Duncan Idaho
Paired opposites define your longings and those longings imprison you.
-The Zensunni Whip
____________________________________________________________
Hunters of Dune and the concluding volume, Sandworms of Dune, bring together the great story lines and beloved characters in Frank Herbert's classic Dune universe, ranging from the time of the Butlerian Jihad to the original Dune series and beyond. Based directly on Frank Herbert's final outline, which lay hidden in a safe-deposit box for a decade, these two volumes will finally answer the urgent questions Dune fans have been debating for two decades.
At the end of Chapterhouse: Dune -- Frank Herbert's final novel -- a ship carrying the ghola of Duncan Idaho, Sheeana (a young woman who can control sandworms), and a crew of various refugees escapes into the uncharted galaxy, fleeing from the monstrous Honored Matres, dark counterparts to the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood. The nearly invincible Honored Matres have swarmed into the known universe, driven from their home by a terrifying, mysterious Enemy.
As designed by the creative genius of Frank Herbert, the primary story of Hunters and Sandworms is the exotic odyssey of Duncan's no-ship as it is forced to elude the diabolical traps set by the ferocious, unknown Enemy. To strengthen their forces, the fugitives have used genetic technology from Scytale, the last Tleilaxu Master, to revive key figures from Dune's past -- including Paul Muad'Dib and his beloved Chani, Lady Jessica, Stilgar, Thufir Hawat, and even Dr. Wellington Yueh. Each of these characters will use their special talents to meet the challenges thrown at them.
Failure is unthinkable -- not only is their survival at stake, but they hold the fate of the entire human race in their hands.
HUNTERS OF DUNE - 2006
Brian Herbert & Kevin J Anderson
QUOTES
The strongest and most altruistic leader, even if his office is dependent on the support of the masses, must look first to the dictates of his heart, never allowing his decisions to be swayed by popular opinion. It is only through courage and strength of character that a true and memorable legacy is ever attained.
-from "Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib" by the PRINCESS IRULAN
All of life is a journey. We are carried along at life's pace, whether we choose to run or sit still.
-Reverend Mother Sheeana
All life is a series of seemingly insignificant tasks and decisions, culminating in the definition of an individual and their purpose in life.
-Bene Gesserit Axiom
If you do not face your weaknesses, how do you know where to be
strong?
-Duncan Idaho
No land or sea or planet is forever. Wherever we stand, we are only
stewards.
-Reverend Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
The participants in great events do not see their place in the overall design. Our failure to see the larger pattern, however, does not disprove that one exists.
-Reverend Mother Sheeana
We can learn much from those who came before us. The most valuable legacy our predecessors can leave us is the knowledge of how to avoid the same deadly mistakes.
-Reverend Mother Sheeana
In our arrogant assumption of superiority, we believe that our developed senses and abilities are the direct result of evolution. We are convinced that our race has bettered itself through technological advancement. Therefore, we are shamed and embarrassed when something we consider to be "primitive" has senses far superior to our own.
-Reverend Mother Sheeana
Rot at the core always spreads outward.
-Sufi proverb
A choice can be as dangerous as a weapon. Refusing to choose is in itself a choice.
-Pearten, ancient Mentat philosopher
We all have an innate ability to recognize flaws and weaknesses in others. It takes much greater courage, however, to recognize the same flaws in ourselves.
-Duncan Idaho
The future is not for us to see as passive observers, but for us to create.
-Paul Muad’Dib
The flesh surrenders itself. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not... yet, I occurred.
-Paul Muad’Dib
Sandworms of Dune - 2007
Brian Herbert & Kevin J Anderson
_____________________________________________________________
Books 1-6 (+ other Frank Herbert & Dune novels) available at this site on PDF.....
[web]http://nprp-bookworm.blogspot.com/2006/10/frank-herbert.html[/web]
And here at 4shared.....
[web]http://www.4shared.com/network/search.jsp?sortType=1&sortOrder=1&sortmode=2&searchDCId=20&searchName=dune+herbert&searchmode=2&searchName=dune+herbert&searchDescription=&searchExtention=&sizeCriteria=atleast&sizevalue=10&start=0[/web]
Hunters of Dune also available here (post #4084).....
[web]http://www.masalatalk.com/masalaboard/showthread.php?t=208649&page=273[/web]
More quotes.....
~ http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dune ~
[website]http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dune[/website]
THANK YOU
With LOVE 
WHEN PAIRED OPPOSITES DEFINE YOUR BELIEFS,
YOUR BELIEFS WILL IMPRISON YOU.
What is TRUTH ? . . . .THAT THE ONENESS IS ALL !!!
What is JOY ? . . . . . .ALL THAT THE ONENESS IS !!!
What is LOVE ? . . . . .THE ONENESS THAT IS ALL !!!
What is LIFE ? . . . . . ALL THAT IS THE ONENESS !!!
WHO AM I ? . . . . . . .THE ONENESS THAT ALL IS !!!
[website]http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dune[/website]
THANK YOU
With LOVE WHEN PAIRED OPPOSITES DEFINE YOUR BELIEFS,
YOUR BELIEFS WILL IMPRISON YOU.
What is TRUTH ? . . . .THAT THE ONENESS IS ALL !!!
What is JOY ? . . . . . .ALL THAT THE ONENESS IS !!!
What is LOVE ? . . . . .THE ONENESS THAT IS ALL !!!
What is LIFE ? . . . . . ALL THAT IS THE ONENESS !!!
WHO AM I ? . . . . . . .THE ONENESS THAT ALL IS !!!
I'll have a flick through to see if I can add some you haven't.
