More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
My crime was to discuss this as a phenomenon, to expound upon their mental arts and their genetic program. You don’t want attention called to the fact that Muad’Dib was the Sisterhood’s hoped for captive messiah, that he was their kwisatz haderach before he was your prophet.
Now, the Empire understands the sham of Muad’Dib’s marriage to the Princess Irulan! Q: You dare accuse Muad’Dib of sham!
he was a mentat, an intellect whose capacities surpassed those of the religiously proscribed mechanical computers used by the ancients.
snow which reflected mottled wet blueness from the small blue-white sun hanging at the meridian.
He had chosen a bland, round-faced appearance for this meeting, jolly features and vapid full lips, the body of a bloated dumpling. It occurred to him now, as he studied his fellow conspirators, that he had made an ideal choice—out of instinct perhaps.
“Well?” the Reverend Mother pressed. “I was enjoying the silence,” Scytale said. “Our hostilities are better left unvoiced.”
Cattay
“The Fremen are civil, educated and ignorant,” Scytale said. “They’re not mad. They’re trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.”
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.
Must we protect them from themselves? he wondered. They play with nothingness every moment—empty lives, empty words. They ask too much of me. His throat felt tight and full. How many moments would he lose? What sons? What dreams? Was it worth the price his vision had revealed? Who would ask the living of some far distant future, who would say to them: “But for Muad’Dib, you would not be here.”
“Constitutions become the ultimate tyranny,” Paul said. “They’re organized power on such a scale as to be overwhelming. The constitution is social power mobilized and it has no conscience.
Why, for example, the mechanical eyes? Tleilaxu boasted their metal eyes improved on the original. Strange, then, that more Tleilaxu didn’t wear them out of choice.
blurs among blurs.
“My sister killed the Baron,” Paul said, voice and manner dry, “just before the battle of Arrakeen.”
“To kill a god,” Paul said. “That’s very interesting. But who says I’m a god?” “Those who worship you,” Edric said, glancing pointedly at Stilgar.
“It seems to most observers, however, that you conspire to make a god of yourself. And one might ask if that is something any mortal can do . . . safely?” Paul studied the Guildsman. Repellent creature, but perceptive. It was a question Paul had asked himself time and again.
A process involving thousands of information bits poured flickering through his computational awareness. It required perhaps three seconds.
"thoughts" you mean
“Are you suggesting that my missionaries of the Holy Orders, all of them, are preaching subtle falsehood?” Paul insisted.
This man's shovel should be takenfrom him ASAP
“Do my arguments lack all merit?” Edric countered. Does he want us to kill him? Paul wondered. Is Edric offering himself as a sacrifice?
and she had died here in the crucible of the desert from the effects of a subtle poison of Tleilaxu origin.
Bastards
The stillsuit hood concealed the line of his jaw.
“I suggested that he judge, no more, guided by one principle, perhaps . . .” “And that?” “To keep his friends and destroy his enemies.” “To judge unjustly, then.” “What is justice? Two forces collide. Each may have the right in his own sphere. And here’s where an Emperor commands orderly solutions. Those collisions he cannot prevent—he solves.” “How?” “In the simplest way: he decides.” “Keeping his friends and destroying his enemies.” “Isn’t that stability? People want order, this kind or some other.
Damn his mother for all eternity! It was her fault the Bene Gesserit had lost their hold on this gene line.
He knew she would see tears on his face and wonder at them. Let her wonder. Wondering was a kindness now.
“We’re all contaminated,” Scytale said, and he reminded himself that Edric’s intelligence had severe limits. How could this point be made that the Guildsman would understand it?
sandclouds darkened the sky over the plaza. Fremen called such weather “dirty air.”
“A man’s messenger is as himself,” Paul said.
Memory unfolded the time-stopping when awareness became a mote which changed the poison.
. . . and still more power—hating every erg of it.
A Tleilaxu toy, learned and alert, Paul thought. The Bene Tleilax never threw away something this valuable.
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.”
Paul, his shield activated and shimmering around him,
“We must hurry,” the dwarf muttered. “Hurry! Hurry!” “You sense danger?” Paul asked, probing. “I know danger!”
“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.”
“What’s law? Control? Law filters chaos and what drips through? Serenity?
You’ll find the serenity, which is just another word for death.”
His mind carried such a burden of mutilated memories. For every instant of reality there existed countless projections, things fated never to be.
A purple belt gathered the waist.
“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.
brown spicepaper scroll,
“Perhaps you accuse yourself,” Alia said. Before he could mask it, mystical terror lay briefly on Korba’s face. It was there for anyone to read: With her powers, Alia had but to accuse him herself, saying she brought the evidence from the shadow region, the alam al-mythal.
“I was distracted,” she said. “There’s been a dramatic change in you, Stil. What is it?” Stilgar drew himself up, shocked. One changed, of course. But dramatically? This was a particular view of himself that he’d never encountered. Drama was a questionable thing. Imported entertainers of dubious loyalty and more dubious virtue were dramatic.
precision by the powers of prescience
Eternity moves. It inflicts itself upon the oracle and the supplicant alike.
Let them deny his powers. Let them never doubt Eternity.
Hayt watched
The potion of melange she’d drained just before leaving the temple was the largest she’d ever attempted—a massive overdose. Even before beginning to take effect, it had terrified her. Why did I do it? she asked herself.
Possession of second sight has a tendency to make one a dangerous fatalist, she thought.
little wells of darkness in the glittering metal.
“We have forgotten,” Paul had said in response to her question, “that the word ‘company’ originally meant traveling companions. We are a company.”
Paul has forgotten that company originally meant people with whom we eat bread.
Water brought pestilence. Only the desert was clean.
