Heretics of Dune (Dune, #5)

by Frank Herbert

Most discipline is hidden discipline, designed not to liberate but to limit. Do not ask Why? Be cautious with How? Why? leads inexorably to paradox. How? traps you in a universe of cause and effect. Both deny the infinite.

How could there be heretical movements among people who held a profoundly manipulative attitude toward all things religious?

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.

“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.”

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.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodiet? Who shall guard the guardians? Who shall see that the guardians commit no offenses?

“Spannungsbogen!” Waff rolled the ancient word on his tongue: The span of the bow! How far back you draw the bow before releasing your arrow. This arrow would strike deep!

“Forces that we cannot understand permeate our universe. We see the shadows of those forces when they are projected upon a screen available to our senses, but understand them we do not.”

“Understanding requires words. Some things cannot be reduced to words. There are things that can only be experienced wordlessly.”

“I marvel that an Atreides has given us this weapon,” Mirlat said. “How can it be that the Atreides always fasten upon an ideal that enlists the billions who must follow?” “It is not the Atreides, it is God,”

As the great hoard far under the sand came to fruition, expanding in an explosion of melange, Shaitan had come. Every child knew Shaitan could not resist a spiceblow.

For this test, though, they fed him increased doses of the spice and he sensed the awakening of his True Self. “The Mind at Its Beginning,” a teaching Sister called it when he asked for an explanation of this odd sensation. For a time, the universe was magical as he looked at it through this new awareness. His awareness was a circle, then a globe. Arbitrary forms became transient.

Curiosity unsatisfied tended to create its own answers. Guesses were often more dangerous than facts.

“Very few people realize how much of the infrastructure in a civilization is dependency infrastructure,” Taraza said. “We have made quite a study of this.” 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,”

Hydraulic despotism: central control of an essential energy such as water, electricity, fuel, medicines, melange .

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!”

Law always chooses sides on the basis of enforcement power. Morality and legal niceties have little to do with it when the real question is: Who has the clout?

Some people never observe anything. Life just happens to them. They get by on little more than a kind of dumb persistence, and they resist with anger and resentment anything that might lift them out of that false serenity.”

The mind of the believer stagnates. It fails to grow outward into an unlimited, infinite universe.”

By your belief in granular singularities, you deny all movement—evolutionary or devolutionary. Belief fixes a granular universe and causes that universe to persist. Nothing can be allowed to change because that way your non-moving universe vanishes. But it moves of itself when you do not move. It evolves beyond you and is no longer accessible to you.

Hatred was as dangerous an emotion as love. The capacity for hatred was the capacity for its opposite.

Nothing surpasses the complexity of the human mind.

Logic could move just as blindly as any other faculty.

Quite early in his training, he had realized that his mother and the others involved in his upbringing had conditioned him to a deep sense of personal honesty. Adherence to a code of honor. The code itself, as he recognized its shape in him, attracted Teg’s fascinated attention. It began with recognition that humans were not created equal, that they possessed different inherited abilities and experienced different events in their lives. This produced people of different accomplishments and different worth.

Quite naturally, holders of power wish to suppress wild research. Unrestricted questing after knowledge has a long history of producing unwanted competition. The powerful want a “safe line of investigations,” which will develop only those products and ideas that can be controlled and, most important, that will allow the larger part of the benefits to be captured by inside investors.

“What does your Sisterhood gain from alliance with us?” Waff managed. Odrade smiled. Now she could speak the truth. That was always much easier and often the most powerful argument.

Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?

Odrade, who allowed certain limited affections, “a mild warmth,” she called them, argued that emotions provided valuable insights if you did not let them govern you.

Tone of voice and attitude alone can subjugate another’s will.

People always want something more than immediate joy or that deeper sense called happiness. This is one of the secrets by which we shape the fulfillment of our designs. The something more assumes amplified power with people who cannot give it a name or who (most often the case) do not even suspect its existence. Most people only react unconsciously to such hidden forces. Thus, we have only to call a calculated something more into existence, define it and give it shape, then people will follow.

“Arafel: the cloud darkness at the end of the universe.”

“WHAT IS SURVIVAL IF YOU DO NOT SURVIVE WHOLE? ASK THE BENE TLEILAX THAT! WHAT IF YOU NO LONGER HEAR THE MUSIC OF LIFE? MEMORIES ARE NOT ENOUGH UNLESS THEY CALL YOU TO NOBLE PURPOSE!”

vital: These three were puppets. Only the puppet masters were important. How the puppets moved—that told you what the puppet masters were doing.

Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They re-create the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the future as well.

Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.

Their voices had that end of the workday lift—a false brilliance composed of the hope that old dreams would be fulfilled, yet colored by the knowledge that life would not change for them.

The worst potential competition for any organism can come from its own kind. The species consumes necessities. Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount. The least favorable condition controls the rate of growth. (Law of the Minimum)

teachers, the great problem of the human universe lay in how you managed procreation.

“You may think of this only as sexuality but we prefer the more basic term: procreation. It has many facets and offshoots and it has apparently unlimited energy. The emotion called ‘love’ is only one small aspect.”

“The writing of history is largely a process of diversion. Most historical accounts divert attention from the secret influences around the recorded events.”