God Emperor of Dune (Dune #4)

by Frank Herbert

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 crop up in every generation and you must not try to prevent this. That’s what he means by “give up the initiative.” He wants to crush them, suppress them, control them, prevent them. He is living proof that there is little difference between the police mind and the military mind.

Radicals always see matters in terms which are too simple—black and white, good and evil, them and us. By addressing complex matters in that way, they rip open a passage for chaos. The art of government as you call it, is the mastery of chaos.”

I assure you from a God’s Olympian perch that government is a shared myth. When the myth dies, the government dies.”

“Religion always leads to rhetorical despotism,” Leto said. “Before the Bene Gesserit, the Jesuits were the best at it.”

“It leads to self-fulfilling prophecy and justifications for all manner of obscenities,”

“This . . . rhetorical despotism, Lord?” “Yes! It shields evil behind walls of self-righteousness which are proof against all arguments against the evil.”

“It feeds on deliberately twisted meanings to discredit opposition,” Leto said. “All of that, Lord?” “The Jesuits called that ‘securing your power base.’ It leads directly to hypocrisy which is always betrayed by the gap between actions and explanations. They never agree.” “I must study this more carefully, Lord.” “Ultimately, it rules by guilt because hypocrisy brings on the witch hunt and the demand for scapegoats.”

“Power bases are very dangerous because they attract people who are truly insane, people who seek power only for the sake of power. Do you understand?”

The devices themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines.”

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.”

You talk of prisons and police and legalities, the perfect illusions behind which a prosperous power structure can operate while observing, quite accurately, that it is above its own laws.”

You do not eliminate every scapegoat.

If we deny the need for thought, Moneo, as some do, we lose the powers of reflection; we cannot define what our senses report. If we deny the flesh, we unwheel the vehicle which bears us. But if we deny emotion, we lose all touch with our internal universe. It was emotions which I missed the most.”

“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.

Moneo knows the price of his privileges, Leto thought. It is another kind of marriage—the marriage of privilege and duty. It is the aristocrat’s explanation and his excuse.

Privilege becomes arrogance. Arrogance promotes injustice. The seeds of ruin blossom.

Pride of birth trails out into penury and the weaknesses of interbreeding. The way is opened for pride of wealth and accomplishment. Enter the nouveaux riches, riding to power as the Harkonnens did, on the backs of the ancient régime.

“They said your liberties all vanish when you look up to any absolute ruler.”

they know that you cannot do wrong in the name of right.”

“Religious institutions perpetuate a mortal master-servant relationship,” Leto said. “They create an arena which attracts prideful human power-seekers with all of their nearsighted prejudices!”

“a million wrongs cannot give rise to one right. The right is known because it endures.”

Systems incorporate the unexamined beliefs of their creators. Adopt a system, accept its beliefs, and you help strengthen the resistance to change.

That had not been Leto’s intention, but he knew that it often happened—an accurate, though ambiguous, answer was taken as confirmation of one’s deepest fears.

Small souls who seek power over others first destroy the faith those others might have in themselves.”

it is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past.”

“Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed.”

History is a constant race between invention and catastrophe. Education helps but it’s never enough. You also must run.”

Think of it as plastic memory, this force within you which trends you and your fellows toward tribal forms. This plastic memory seeks to return to its ancient shape, the tribal society. It is all around you—the feudatory, the diocese, the corporation, the platoon, the sports club, the dance troupes, the rebel cell, the planning council, the prayer group . . . each with its master and servants, its host and parasites. And the swarms of alienating devices (including these very words!) tend eventually to be enlisted in the argument for a return to “those better times.” I despair of teaching you other ways. You have square thoughts which resist circles.

“It is human to have your soul brought to a crisis you did not anticipate.