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Duncan Idaho’s odd Mentat metaphor helped. Self-awareness: facing mirrors that pass through the universe, gathering new images on the way—endlessly reflexive. The infinite seen as finite, the analogue of consciousness carrying the sensed bits of infinity.
“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
“Enclosures of any kind are a fertile breeding ground for hatred of outsiders,” she said. “That produces a bitter harvest.”
soostones!”
We tend to become like the worst in those we oppose. —BENE GESSERIT CODA
Built into his machine, she thought. That said something about the way humans were fitted to the things they did. Lucilla sensed a weakening force in this thought. If you fitted yourself too tightly to one thing, other abilities atrophied. We become what we do.
You cannot manipulate a marionette with only one string. —THE ZENSUNNI WHIP
Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your own life. The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck. —DARWI ODRADE
‘Know nothing! Learn to be totally naive.’” She was astonished. “Nothing at all?” “You approach everything with a clean slate, nothing on you or in you. Whatever comes is written there by itself.” She began to see it. “Nothing to interfere.”
It was a typical Mentat approach: concentrate on the questions. Mentats accumulated questions the way others accumulated answers. Questions created their own patterns and systems. This produced the most important shapes.
“Everything you do, everything you sense and say is experiment. No deduction final. Nothing stops until dead and perhaps not even then, because each life creates endless ripples.
Corruption wears infinite disguises.
sometimes think it too bad we no longer have it. Producing perfection from imperfection is, after all, the highest of art forms.”
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.
Remember: Bureaucracy elevates conformity . . . make that elevates “fatal stupidity” to the status of religion.
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)
Silence is often the best thing to say,
Odrade smiled at the acolyte beside her in the dining hall. “How would you like to be a horse?”
Religion (emulation of adults by the child) encysts past mythologies: guesses, hidden assumptions of trust in the universe, pronouncements made in search of personal power, all mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always an unspoken commandment: Thou shalt not question! We break that commandment daily in the harnessing of human imagination to our deepest creativity. —BENE GESSERIT CREDO
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
The Senior Watchdog had her own watchwords: “Show me a completely smooth operation and I’ll show you someone who’s covering mistakes. Real boats rock.”
Mentats! Odrade thought. They were like walking Archives but when you most needed answers they relapsed into questions.
We do not teach history; we recreate the experience. We follow the chain of consequences—the tracks of the beast in its forest. Look behind our words and you see the broad sweep of social behavior that no historian has ever touched. —BENE GESSERIT PANOPLIA PROPHETICUS
I did not seek this power. It was thrust upon me. And she thought: Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect all who seek it. She knew the chances were great that such people were susceptible to corruption or already lost.
Dortujla.
Hardscrabble
Odrade recalled the other key then: soostones. Buzzell was a place where they had naturalized the monoped sea creature, Cholister, whose abraded carapace produced marvelous tumors, one of the most valued jewels in the universe. Soostones.
All states are abstractions. —OCTUN POLITICUS, BG ARCHIVES
Politics: the art of appearing candid and completely open while concealing as much as possible.”
“Laws convey the myth of enforced change. A bright new future will come because of this law or that one. Laws enforce the future. Regulations are believed to enforce the past.”
Power attracts the corruptible.”
Some never participate. Life happens to them. They get by on little more than dumb persistence and resist with anger or violence all things that might lift them out of resentment-filled illusions of security. —ALMA MAVIS TARAZA
Winking lights held her attention for a moment. A variation on the old question about a tree falling in the forest: Was there sound if no one heard? Odrade voted on the side of those who said vibrations existed no matter whether a sensor recorded them.
Face your fears or they will climb over your back.
To know a thing well, know its limits. Only when pushed beyond its tolerances will true nature be seen. —THE AMTAL RULE
Do not depend only on theory if your life is at stake. —BENE GESSERIT COMMENTARY
“Facts are fragile. A Mentat can get tangled in them. Too much reliable data. It’s like diplomacy. You need a few good lies to get at your projections.”
Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. The judgmental precedents of law function that way, littering your path with dead ends. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary. —MENTAT FIXE (ADACTO)
Major flaws in government arise from a fear of making radical internal changes even though a need is clearly seen. —DARWI ODRADE
Time does not count itself. You have only to look at a circle and this is apparent. —LETO II (THE TYRANT)
“Our gods should mature as we mature.”
His thoughts were like tesserae, most of the pieces at hand and ready to fit into a mosaic.
Cottages at Cordeville by Vincent Van Gogh.
“The greatest relevancy can become irrelevant in the space of a heartbeat. Mentats should look upon such moments with joy.”
Some precious stones could be identified by their impurities. Experts mapped impurities within the stones. A secret fingerprint. People were like that. You often knew them by their defects. The glittering surface told you too little. Good identification required you to look deep inside and see the impurities.
Nostalgia. It blocked paths of proper judgment.
The tyranny of the minority cloaked in the mask of the majority.
She stared back suddenly with that look the Sisterhood called “BG placid,” than which there probably was nothing more placid in the universe,
nothing more completely a mask of what occurred behind it. This was not just a barrier, it was a nothing.
