Dune (Dune #1)

by Frank Herbert

“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.”

“Then she said a good ruler has to learn his world’s language, that it’s different for every world. And I thought she meant they didn’t speak Galach on Arrakis, but she said that wasn’t it at all. She said she meant the language of the rocks and growing things, the language you don’t hear just with your ears. And I said that’s what Dr. Yueh calls the Mystery of Life.”

“Not the blood, sir. But all of a man’s water, ultimately, belongs to his people—to his tribe. It’s a necessity when you live near the Great Flat. All water’s precious there, and the human body is composed of some seventy per cent water by weight. A dead man, surely, no longer requires that water.”

“Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount. And, naturally, the least favorable condition controls the growth rate.”

“I never could bring myself to trust a traitor,” the Baron said. “Not even a traitor I created.”

Leto suddenly recalled a thing Gurney Halleck had said once, seeing a picture of the Baron: “‘And I stood upon the sand of the sea and saw a beast rise up out of the sea…and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.’”

He remembered once seeing a gauze kerchief blowing in the wind and now he sensed the future as though it twisted across some surface as undulant and impermanent as that of the windblown kerchief. He saw people. He felt the heat and cold of uncounted probabilities. He knew names and places, experienced emotions without number, reviewed data of innumerable unexplored crannies. There was time to probe and test and taste, but no time to shape. The thing was a spectrum of possibilities from the most remote past to the most remote future—from the most probable to the most improbable. He saw his own death in countless ways. He saw new planets, new cultures. People. People. He saw them in such swarms they could not be listed, yet his mind catalogued them.

“Expensive, eh?” “Expensive!” The Baron shot a fat arm toward Rabban. “If you squeeze Arrakis for every cent it can give us for sixty years, you’ll just barely repay us!”

“The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.”

“To the working planetologist, his most important tool is human beings,” his father said. “You must cultivate ecological literacy among the people. That’s why I’ve created this entirely new form of ecological notation.”

“Movement across the landscape is a necessity for animal life,”

“We must do a thing on Arrakis never before attempted for an entire planet,” his father said. “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.”

“No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero,” his father said.

Nothing on this planet had so forcefully hammered into her the ultimate value of water. Not the water-sellers, not the dried skins of the natives, not stillsuits or the rules of water discipline. Here there was a substance more precious than all others—it was life itself and entwined all around with symbolism and ritual. Water.

She focused on the psychokinesthetic extension of herself, looking within, and was confronted immediately with a cellular core, a pit of blackness from which she recoiled. 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 have seen a friend become a worshiper, he thought.

There should be a word-tension directly opposite to adab, the demanding memory, she thought. There should be a word for memories that deny themselves.

“How would you like to live billions upon billions of lives?” Paul asked. “There’s a fabric of legends for you! Think of all those experiences, the wisdom they’d bring. But wisdom tempers love, doesn’t it? And it puts a new shape on hate. How can you tell what’s ruthless unless you’ve plumbed the depths of both cruelty and kindness? You should fear me, Mother. I am the Kwisatz Haderach.”

This is the climax, Paul thought. From here, the future will open, the clouds part onto a kind of glory. And if I die here, they’ll say I sacrificed myself that my spirit might lead them. And if I live, they’ll say nothing can oppose Muad’Dib.

“The thing the ecologically illiterate don’t realize about an ecosystem,” Kynes said, “is that it’s a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That’s why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.” Had they achieved a system?

The Bene Gesserit, who privately denied they were a religious order, but who operated behind an almost impenetrable screen of ritual mysticism, and whose training, whose symbolism, organization, and internal teaching methods were almost wholly religious;

Mankind’s movement through deep space placed a unique stamp on religion during the one hundred and ten centuries that preceded the Butlerian Jihad.

The god of machine-logic was overthrown among the masses and a new concept was raised: “Man may not be replaced.”

1. The realization that all religions had at least one common commandment: “Thou shalt not disfigure the soul.”

“We are here to remove a primary weapon from the hands of disputant religions. That weapon—the claim to possession of the one and only revelation.”

With such a tradition, suffering is accepted—perhaps as unconscious punishment, but accepted. And it’s well to note that Fremen ritual gives almost complete freedom from guilt feelings. This isn’t necessarily because their law and religion were identical, making disobedience a sin. It’s likely closer to the mark to say they cleansed themselves of guilt easily because their everyday existence required brutal judgments (often deadly) which in a softer land would burden men with unbearable guilt.

And because you are here, because you have the religion, victory cannot evade you in the end.

“When religion and politics ride the same cart, when that cart is driven by a living holy man (baraka), nothing can stand in their path.”