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Most of them argued a particular viewpoint, jealous and sectarian, but it says something about the peculiar impact of this man that he aroused such passions on so many diverse worlds.
There exists no separation between gods and men; one blends softly casual into the other. —PROVERBS
“Reason is the first victim of strong emotion,”
He thought of the Water Sellers, their way destroyed by the lavish dispensing from his hands. They hated him. He’d slain the past. And there were others, even those who’d fought for the sols to buy precious water, who hated him for changing the old ways. As the ecological pattern dictated by Muad’Dib remade the planet’s landscape, human resistance increased. Was it not presumptuous, he wondered, to think he could make over an entire planet—everything growing where and how he told it to grow? Even if he succeeded, what of the universe waiting out there? Did it fear similar treatment?
Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual.
“How can my brother give you explicit information about the limits of something which has no limits? The boundaries escape the intellect.” That was a nasty thing for Alia to do, Paul thought. It would alarm Irulan, who had such a careful consciousness, so dependent upon values derived from precise limits.
“Deceit is a tool of statecraft,”
Everywhere there is peace, Paul thought. Everywhere . . . except in the heart of Muad’Dib.
Truth suffers from too much analysis.
His unique powers must make him lonely. To whom could he speak in any hope of being understood? To the sister, obviously. She shared this loneliness.
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear .
“Power tends to isolate those who hold too much of it. Eventually, they lose touch with reality . . . and fall.”
“And rulers are notoriously cynical where religions are concerned. Religion, too, is a weapon. What manner of weapon is religion when it becomes the government?”
“Some say,” Scytale said, “that people cling to Imperial leadership because space is infinite. They feel lonely without a unifying symbol. For a lonely people, the Emperor is a definite place. They can turn toward him and say: ‘See, there He is. He makes us one.’ Perhaps religion serves the same purpose, m’Lord.”
You couldn’t say something boundless within the boundaries of any language.
“Statistics: at a conservative estimate, I’ve killed sixty-one billion, sterilized ninety planets, completely demoralized five hundred others. I’ve wiped out the followers of forty religions which had existed since—”
forwardness. It was a Fremen thing: slyness touched by respect for another’s privacy, a movement of necessity.
Curiosity urges me forward,
“But an easy place to hide,” she said. She looked at him. “It reminds me of a human mind . . . with all its concealments.”
“Both of you were taught to govern,” he said. “You were conditioned to an overweening thirst for power. You were imbued with a shrewd grasp of politics and a deep understanding for the uses of war and ritual. Natural law? What natural law? That myth haunts human history. Haunts! It’s a ghost. It’s insubstantial, unreal. Is your Jihad a natural law?”
“I told him that to endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe.”
“And that’s why you are dangerous,” she said, measuring out her words. “You’ve mastered your passions.”
I think what a joy it is to be alive, and I wonder if I’ll ever leap inward to the root of this flesh and know myself as once I was. The root is there. Whether any act of mine can find it, that remains tangled in the future. But all things a man can do are mine. Any act of mine may do it.
“You run from death. You strain at the next instant, refuse to live here and now.
“You fear your own powers. Things fall into your head from nowhere. When they fall out, where do they go?”
The flesh surrenders itself, he thought. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not . . . yet, I occurred.
There are many degrees of sight and many degrees of blindness, Paul thought. His mind turned to a paraphrase of the passage from the Orange Catholic Bible: What senses do we lack that we cannot see another world all around us?
“What is enduring about beauty and pleasure?” Edric demanded. “We will destroy both Atreides. Culture! They dispense culture the better to rule. Beauty! They promote the beauty which enslaves. They create a literate ignorance—easiest thing of all. They leave nothing to chance. Chains! Everything they do forges chains, enslaves. But slaves always revolt.”
“Oh, be still!” Scytale barked. “You can’t stop a mental epidemic. It leaps from person to person across parsecs.
“Every man carries his own past with him,” Hayt said. “And every ghola?” Paul asked. “In a way, m’Lord.”
No matter how exotic human civilization becomes, no matter the developments of life and society nor the complexity of the machine/human interface, there always come interludes of lonely power when the course of humankind, the very future of humankind, depends upon the relatively simple actions of single individuals.
within all differences there is unity.”
“Beginning and end are a single thing,” Alia snapped. “Have I not told you this before? You didn’t come here to ask that question. What is it you cannot believe that you must come here and cry out against it?”
The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: “I feed on your energy.”
“They’ve blinded my body, but not my vision,” Paul said. “Ah, Stil, I live in an apocalyptic dream. My steps fit into it so precisely that I fear most of all I will grow bored reliving the thing so exactly.”
try to understand it. Accept it. I am in the world beyond this world here. For me, they are the same. I need no hand to guide me. I see every movement all around me. I see every expression of your face. I have no eyes, yet I see.”
Now the forces gather, Paul thought. And he noted how strong was the smell of fear in the perspiration all around.
“You can’t build politics on love,” he said. “People aren’t concerned with love; it’s too disordered. They prefer despotism. Too much freedom breeds chaos. We can’t have that, can we? And how do you make despotism lovable?”
“What’s law? Control? Law filters chaos and what drips through? Serenity? Law—our highest ideal and our basest nature.
“Government cannot be religious and self-assertive at the same time. Religious experience needs a spontaneity which laws inevitably suppress. And you cannot govern without laws. Your laws eventually must replace morality, replace conscience, replace even the religion by which you think to govern.
His face, though, was filled with the things she’d sensed in her mother’s letter—the replacement of morality and conscience with law. “You produce a deadly paradox.”
She hated the water then, inspired by the worm’s fear. Water, once the spirit-soul of Arrakis, had become a poison. Water brought pestilence. Only the desert was clean.
Do not compete with what is happening. To compete is to prepare for failure. Do not be trapped by the need to achieve anything. This way, you achieve everything.”
Life changed those irascible wastes into shapes of grace and movement, he thought. That was the message of the desert.
Awareness turned over at the thought of all those stars above him—an infinite volume. A man must be half mad to imagine he could rule even a teardrop of that volume. He couldn’t begin to imagine the number of subjects his Imperium claimed.
The young master had some of the old man in him. “...what must be done!”
“There are problems in this universe for which there are no answers,” Paul said. “Nothing. Nothing can be done.”
The plodding, self-important language of government enraged him. It had seduced the Fremen.
“He will not be found,” Stilgar said. “Yet all men will find him.”
“All men are interlopers, old friend.”
