Dune (Dune #1)

by Frank Herbert

“We Bene Gesserit sift people to find the humans.”

Paul felt that he had been infected with terrible purpose. He did not know yet what the terrible purpose was.

into something greater. “Why do you test for humans?” he asked. “To set you free.” “Free?” “Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

instinct for rightness.

We’ve a three-point civilization: the Imperial Household balanced against the Federated Great Houses of the Landsraad, and between them, the Guild with its damnable monopoly on interstellar transport. In politics, the tripod is the most unstable of all structures. It’d be bad enough without the complication of a feudal trade culture which turns its back on most science.”

A world is supported by four things….” She held up four big-knuckled fingers. “…the learning 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….” She closed her fingers into a fist. “…without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!”

She said the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.

“She’s the One all right,” she muttered. “Poor thing.”

The Baron cannot forget that Leto is a cousin of the royal blood—no matter what the distance—while the Harkonnen titles came out of the CHOAM pocketbook. But the poison in him, deep in his mind, is the knowledge that an Atreides had a Harkonnen banished for cowardice after the Battle of Corrin.”

The Duke felt in this moment that his own dearest dream was to end all class distinctions and never again think of deadly order.

He looked up and out of the dust at the unwinking stars, thought: Around one of those little lights circles Caladan…but I’ll never again see my home.

“O you who know what we suffer here, do not forget us in your prayers.”

The whole theory of warfare is calculated risk,” the Duke said, “but when it comes to risking your own family, the element of calculation gets submerged in…other things.”

“The knife is ground from a sandworm’s tooth; it’s the mark of the Fremen, Sire. With it, a blue-eyed man could penetrate any sietch in the land.

There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man—with human flesh.

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.

All of a pattern, he thought. You can plumb us by our language—the precise and delicate delineations for ways to administer treacherous death. Will someone try chaumurky tonight—poison in the drink? Or will it be chaumas—poison in the food?

“Humans live best when each has his own place, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things. Destroy the place and destroy the person.

There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.

For now is my grief heavier than the sands of the seas, she thought. This world has emptied me of all but the oldest purpose: tomorrow’s life. I live now for my young Duke and the daughter yet to be.

“The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.”

“You’ve recognized this place correctly,” Kynes said. “For what would you use such a place, Paul Atreides?” “To make this planet a fit place for humans,” Paul said. Perhaps that’s why I help them, Kynes thought.

“‘Law is the ultimate science,’” Paul quoted.

My son has the Atreides sincerity, Jessica thought. He has that tremendous, almost naive honor—and what a powerful force that truly is.

“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 me I will turn to see fear’s path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

I’m afraid of my son; I fear his strangeness; I fear what he may see ahead of us, what he may tell me.

Finally he said: “She is too beautiful. We will save her as a gift.”

The night is a tunnel, she thought, a hole into tomorrow…if we’re to have a tomorrow.

What has the worm to do with the spice, melange? he asked himself. And he remembered Liet-Kynes betraying a veiled reference to some association between worm and spice.

“It was lines of movement that gave us the first clue to the relationship between worms and spice,” his father said.

“The Arrakeen environment built itself into the evolutionary pattern of native life forms,” his father said. “How strange that so few people ever looked up from the spice long enough to wonder at the near-ideal nitrogen-oxygen-CO2 balance being maintained here in the absence of large areas of plant cover. The energy sphere of the planet is there to see and understand—a relentless process, but a process nonetheless. There is a gap in it? Then something occupies that gap. Science is made up of so many things that appear obvious after they are explained. I knew the little maker was there, deep in the sand, long before I ever saw it.”

The physical qualities of a planet are written into its economic and political record. We have the record in front of us and our course is obvious.”

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?

That girl! She was like a touch of destiny.

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.”

I think now he was a man fighting constantly to escape the bars of an invisible cage.

This was death hanging on an infinite number of minuscule mischances.

And again he remembered the vision of fanatic legions following the green and black banner of the Atreides, pillaging and burning across the universe in the name of their prophet Muad’Dib. That must not happen, he told himself.

The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture—it begins in the dignity with which we treat our dead.

To Paul, the sound was like moments ticking away. He could feel time flowing through him, the instants never to be recaptured. He sensed a need for decision, but felt powerless to move.

My mother is my enemy. She does not know it, but she is. She is bringing the jihad. She bore me; she trained me. She is my enemy.

The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.

And the Lady Fenring thought: Can that be the young man the Reverend Mother meant? Is that a bloodline we must preserve?

“We won’t fail,” she said. “Guilt starts as a feeling of failure,” he reminded.

“There’ll be no guilt,” she said. “Hypno-ligation of that Feyd-Rautha’s psyche and his child in my womb—then we go.”

That is the place where we cannot look, she thought. There is the place the Reverend Mothers are so reluctant to mention—the place where only a Kwisatz Haderach may look.

“I’ve been a long time waiting for you,” she said. “Here is my life.”

I’m like a person whose hands were kept numb, without sensation from the first moment of awareness—until one day the ability to feel is forced into them. The thought hung in her mind, an enclosing awareness. And I say: “Look! I have no hands!” But the people all around me say: “What are hands?”

“When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement becomes headlong—faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it’s too late.”

His entire future was becoming like a river hurtling toward a chasm—the violent nexus beyond which all was fog and clouds.