More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Let sleeping worms lie.”
Use love but avoid it,
Tolerate love but guard against it, that was the rule. Know that it lay deep within the human genetic makeup, a safety net to insure continuation of the species.
“Doubt? Oh, no. But I do experience frustration. We work all of our lives for these highly refined goals and in the end, what do we find? We find that many of the things to which we have dedicated our lives came from petty decisions. They can be traced to desires for personal comfort or convenience and had nothing at all to do with our high ideals. What really was at stake was some worldly working agreement that satisfied the needs of those who could make the decisions.”
Problems arose from the fact that the foster mother gave Odrade that thing which most mothers give their children, that thing which the Sisterhood so distrusted—love.
“Love leads to misery. Love is a very ancient force, which served its purpose in its day but no longer is essential for the survival of the species. Remember that woman’s mistake, the pain.”
They learned early that sharing secret or private names was an ancient device for ensnaring a person in affections.
“She allowed herself to fall in love!” Such a small thing but how great the consequences.
“It’s the not knowing that conjures up the greatest terrors,”
“We’ll probably never know the whole truth of it, but I tell you, lad, that’s no religion for a soldier.”
“You are to learn about the Tyrant but you are not to believe in his religion. That is beneath you, contemptible.”
Humans live best when each has his place to stand, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things and what he may achieve. Destroy the place and you destroy the person.
If only one person followed such guiding principles, this was a better universe. It was never a question of justice. Justice required resort to law and that could be a fickle mistress, subject always to the whims and prejudices of those who administered the laws. No, it was a question of fairness, a concept that went much deeper. The people upon whom judgment was passed must feel the fairness of it.
gnomic utterances had no place in his universe. You took the universe as you found it and applied your principles where you could.
“It’s safe to love land and places,”
“It is dangerous to be called Atreides in this age,”
“Understanding requires words. Some things cannot be reduced to words. There are things that can only be experienced wordlessly.”
“Assumptions based on understanding contain belief in an absolute ground out of which all things spring like plants growing from seeds.”
“The act of saying that things exist that cannot be described in words shakes a universe where words are the supreme belief.”
“I can say God, but that is not my God. That is only a noise and no more potent than any other noise.”
All of them, Waff observed, had been restored to the central security of their faith. It had been easily managed. No Masheikh shared the powindah stupidity that whined: “In thy infinite grace, God, why me?” In one sentence, the powindah invoked infinity and denied it, never once observing their own foolishness.
“How can it be that the Atreides always fasten upon an ideal that enlists the billions who must follow?”
He thought he could feel the document vibrating in his hand. This Atreides Manifesto was the very kind of thing the masses of powindah would follow to their doom.
There was no justice on the open sand.
The councillors were a motley lot. Scions of old priestly families, each carried in his heart the belief that matters would move better if he were sitting on Tuek’s bench.
She smiled at him without humor.
“When logic fails, another tool must be used.” Waff grinned. “That sounds logical.”
“How little you know the joys I could give you,” she said. Her voice coiled like a whip around him. How tempting! How seductive!
“I do not know your ways, Honored Matre,” Waff said. “But I sense in your words that I have offended.” “Apology accepted.” No apology intended!
How like a predatory bird she was, sitting there with her claw hands so lightly on the arms of her chair! Rot at the core spreads outward. He had said it and she had not heard.
“You seek the way to nullify a no-ship’s invisibility,” he said. The statement obviously rocked her. She had not expected this from the elflike manikin seated in front of her. He saw fear, then anger, then resolution pass across her features before she resumed her predatory mask. She knew, though. She knew he had seen.
A smile of pleasure softened her features. “Are the Tleilaxu to be our willing servants or compelled?” He did not try to hide outrage. “You offer us slavery?” “That is one of your options.” He had her now! Arrogance was her weakness. Submissively, he asked: “What would you command me to do?”
Sheeana would learn in time that any person who lived through the decision to die evolved a new emotional balance. Fears were transitory. This new condition was interesting.
“Begone!” Cania commanded. There was no mistaking the look of malevolent glee on her face. Cania had not been included among the vile ones. But these priests clearly stood among those labeled as haram! They must have done something hideous for God to send a child-priestess to chastise them. Cania could believe it of priests. They had seldom treated her the way she deserved.
In my estimation, more misery has been created by reformers than by any other force in human history. Show me someone who says, “Something must be done!” and I will show you a head full of vicious intentions that have no other outlet.
It was forbidden to speak of gholas with the ghola.
He had never cried out even at her nastier tricks. He merely stared back at her, hating her but absorbing her lesson.
“Religion is a source of energy,” she said. “You must recognize this energy. It can be directed for your own purposes.”
Curiosity unsatisfied tended to create its own answers. Guesses were often more dangerous than facts.
Combat these days was seldom a massive thing but death was there nonetheless. That represented a more permanent kind of failure. If we cannot adjust our differences peacefully we are less than human.
“You value your own skin too much to be a good soldier. None of my people would have made such an error.”
“One must always observe the niceties,” Teg said. “Otherwise we are less than human.”
“We like to settle the most passionate situations off the battlefield.
The male responded as expected, stupidly. It helped to think of him as stupid.
Love is a dependency infrastructure,
“Dependency infrastructure is a term that includes all things necessary for a human population to survive at existing or increased numbers,”
Humans have such a powerful need that their own belief structure be the ‘true belief.’ If it gives you pleasure or a sense of security and if it is incorporated into your belief structure, what a powerful dependency that creates!”
“Just as the universe is created by the participation of consciousness, the prescient human carries that creative faculty to its ultimate extreme. This was the profoundly misunderstood power of the Atreides bastard, the power that he transmitted to his son, the Tyrant.”
Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order.
You could drown in the right kind of eyes, he had learned, sink right into them and be unaware of what was being done to you until penis was firmly clasped in vagina.
