Chapterhouse: Dune (Dune Chronicles, #6)

by Frank Herbert

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

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 Zensunni Master

“Enclosed,” she said. “How tempting it is to raise high walls and keep out change. Rot here in our own self-satisfied comfort.” Her words filled him with disquiet. He felt he had heard them before … some other place with a different woman holding his hand. “Enclosures of any kind are a fertile breeding ground for hatred of outsiders,” she said. “That produces a bitter harvest.”

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that power is a magnet to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.

“Karl Marx made the mistake most jealous humans make: thinking everything he hated was evil and that he had the best correctives. He never faced the fact that jealousy and hatred themselves are the problem. The first correction has to be within you.”

“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 dedicated ourselves continuously to the sacred presence we share and create.”

It was a pattern the Sisterhood had long recognized: the inevitable failure of slavery and peonage. You created a reservoir of hate. Implacable enemies. If you had no hope of exterminating all of these enemies, you dared not try. Temper your efforts by the sure awareness that oppression will make your enemies strong. The oppressed will have their day and heaven help the oppressor when that day comes. It was a two-edged blade. The oppressed always learned from and copied the oppressor. When the tables were turned, the stage was set for another round of revenge and violence—roles reversed. And reversed and reversed ad nauseam.

Thinking you knew something was a sure way to blind yourself. It was not growing up that slowly applied brakes to learning (Mentats were taught) but an accumulation of “things I know”.

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.

“Revenge is for children and the emotionally retarded.”