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Mischief is a most profound pleasure. It’s in the ways we deal with mischief that we sharpen creativity.”
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It was difficult avoiding the thought that Leto’s face was an obscenity, a lost bit of humanity trapped in something alien.
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. That’s why I can convert them so easily.
“Radicals are only to be feared when you try to suppress them. You must demonstrate that you will use the best of what they offer.”
“We are myth-killers, you and I, Moneo. That’s the dream we share. I assure you from a God’s Olympian perch that government is a shared myth. When the myth dies, the government dies.”
Technology breeds anarchy. It distributes these tools at random. And with them goes the provocation for violence. The ability to make and use savage destroyers falls inevitably into the hands of smaller and smaller groups until at last the group is a single individual.”
I assure you that the ability to view our futures can become a bore. Even to be thought of as a god, as I certainly was, can become ultimately boring. It has occurred to me more than once that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.
Such a landscape as this one turns you inward in search for whatever freedom your spirits can find within. Most humans are not strong enough to find freedom within.”
This phenomenon has been repeated many times in human history, not only with water and the products of arable land, but with hydrocarbon fuels such as petroleum and coal which were controlled through pipelines and other distribution networks. At one time, when distribution of electricity was only through complicated mazes of lines strung across the landscape, even this energy resource fell into the role of a hydraulic-despotism substance.
timely
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Odd as it may seem, great struggles such as the one you can see emerging from my journals are not always visible to the participants. Much depends on what people dream in the secrecy of their hearts. I have always been as concerned with the shaping of dreams as with the shaping of actions. Between the lines of my journals is the struggle with humankind’s view of itself—a sweaty contest on a field where motives from our darkest past can well up out of an unconscious reservoir and become events with which we not only must live but contend. It is the hydra-headed monster which always attacks from
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Will you accept your own extinction?
Unceasing warfare gives rise to its own social conditions which have been similar in all epochs. People enter a permanent state of alertness to ward off attacks. You see the absolute rule of the autocrat. All new things become dangerous frontier districts—new planets, new economic areas to exploit, new ideas or new devices, visitors—everything suspect. Feudalism takes firm hold, sometimes disguised as a politbureau or similar structure, but always present. Hereditary succession follows the lines of power. The blood of the powerful dominates. The vice regents of heaven or their equivalent
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“Power bases are very dangerous because they attract people who are truly insane, people who seek power only for the sake of power.
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Tears welled from her eyes and ran down her cheeks, but Leto was grateful that she did not indulge in any other display such as falling to her knees.
She left quietly, but Leto could see that Hwi, too, was tortured. There was no mistaking the deep sadness in her for the humanity Leto had sacrificed. She knew what Leto knew: they would have been friends, lovers, companions in an ultimate sharing between the sexes. Her masters had planned for her to know. The Ixians are cruel! he thought. They knew what our pain would be.
Safaris through ancestral memories teach me many things. The patterns, ahhh, the patterns. Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me most. I distrust the extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It’s true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who form such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of
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Leto hardened his voice. “As you well know, the secret of community lies in suppression of the incompatible.” “There can be enormous value in cooperation,” Anteac said. “To you, not to me.”
“You dissect me with words when you would prefer sharper instruments,” Leto said. “Hypocrisy offends me.” “We protest, Lord,” Anteac said. “Indeed you do. I hear you.”
“Specialists are masters of exclusion, experts in the narrow.”
“The expectations which history creates for one generation are often shattered in the next generation. Who knows that better than you?”
“Your original unselfish choice fills you now with selfishness.”
Why else would one keep one’s ancestors around? You think a man designed the first Guild ship? Your history books told you it was Aurelius Venport? They lied. It was his mistress, Norma. She gave him the design, along with five children. He thought his ego would take no less. In the end, the knowledge that he had not really fulfilled his own image, that was what destroyed him.”
At the portal, one Fish Speaker guard whispered to another: “Is God troubled?” And her companion replied: “The sins of this universe would trouble anyone.” Leto heard them and wept silently.
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
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Religion suppresses curiosity. What I do subtracts from the worshipper. Thus it is that eventually I will do nothing, giving it all back to frightened people who will find themselves on that day alone and forced to act for themselves. —THE STOLEN JOURNALS
Women make common cause based on their sex, a cause which transcends class and caste. That is why I let my women hold the reins.”
“My houris tame the males,” Leto said. “It is domestication, a thing that females know from eons of necessity.” Idaho stared wordlessly at Leto’s cowled face. “To tame,” Leto said. “To fit into some orderly survival pattern. Women learned it at the hands of men; now men learn it at the hands of women.”
The problem of leadership is inevitably: Who will play God? —MUAD’DIB, FROM THE ORAL HISTORY
“Think on the price I pay,” he said. “Every descendant part of me will carry some of my awareness locked away within it, lost and helpless.” She put both hands over her mouth and stared at him. “This is the horror which my father could not face and which he tried to prevent: the infinite division and subdivision of a blind identity.”
Leto smiled. “Duncan, have I not told you that when you think you know something, that is a most perfect barrier against learning?”
Police are inevitably corrupted.”
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.”
Prisons are needed only to provide the illusion that courts and police are effective. They’re a kind of job insurance.”
“I preserve life while setting the stage for the next cycle.”
I have isolated the city-experience within me and have examined it closely. The idea of a city fascinates me. The formation of a biological community without a functioning, supportive social community leads to havoc. Whole worlds have become single biological communities without an interrelated social structure and this has always led to ruin. It becomes dramatically instructive under overcrowded conditions. The ghetto is lethal. Psychic stresses of overcrowding create pressures which will erupt. The city is an attempt to manage these forces. The social forms by which cities make the attempt
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“Drug knowledge originated mostly with males because they tend to be more venturesome—an outgrowth of male aggression. You’ve read your Orange Catholic Bible, thus you know the story of Eve and the apple. Here’s an interesting fact about that story: Eve was not the first to pluck and sample the apple. Adam was first and he learned by this to put the blame on Eve. My story tells you something about how our societies find a structural necessity for sub-groups.”
“This wise man observed that wealth is a tool of freedom. But the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.”
“A bad administrator is more concerned with reports than with decisions. He wants the hard record which he can display as an excuse for his errors.” “And good administrators?” “Oh, they depend on verbal orders. They never lie about what they’ve done if their verbal orders cause problems, and they surround themselves with people able to act wisely on the basis of verbal orders. Often, the most important piece of information is that something has gone wrong. Bad administrators hide their mistakes until it’s too late to make corrections.”
“One of the hardest things for a tyrant to find,” he said, “is people who actually make decisions.”
Groups tend to condition their surroundings for group survival. When they deviate from this it may be taken as a sign of group sickness. There are many telltale symptoms. I watch the sharing of food. This is a form of communication, an inescapable sign of mutual aid which also contains a deadly signal of dependency. It is interesting that men are the ones who usually tend the landscape today. They are husband-men. Once, that was the sole province of women. —THE STOLEN JOURNALS
The ache remained within him. Hwi was an inescapable reality, something so basic that no word could ever fully express it. The ache within him was almost more than he could bear. “I love you, Hwi. I love you as a man loves a woman . . . but it cannot be. That will never be.”
“You are neither devil nor god, but something never seen before and never to be seen again because your presence removes the need.”
“Reason is valuable,” he said, “only when it performs against the wordless physical background of the universe.”
“As long as there is life, every ending is a beginning,” he said. “And I would save humankind, even from itself.” Again, she nodded. The tracks still led onward. “This is why no death in the perpetuation of humankind can be a complete failure,” he said. “This is why a birth touches us so deeply. This is why the most tragic death is the death of a youth.”
“The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines,” Leto said. “Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed.”
“Throughout our history,” Leto said, “the most potent use of words has been to round out some transcendental event, giving that event a place in the accepted chronicles, explaining the event in such a way that ever afterward we can use those words and say: “This is what it meant.”
“Make no heroes,” my father said. —THE VOICE OF GHANIMA, FROM THE ORAL HISTORY
“The surest sign that an aristocracy exists is the discovery of barriers against change, curtains of iron or steel or stone or of any substance which excludes the new, the different.”
The best prophets lead you up to the curtain and let you peer through for yourself.
