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“No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.”
The author felt that heroic leaders often made mistakes . . . mistakes that were amplified by the number of followers who were held in thrall by charisma.
Frank Herbert was warning that entire societies could be led to ruination by heroes.
Among my father’s most important messages were that governments lie to protect themselves and they make incredibly stupid decisions.
As with all priests, you learned early to call the truth heresy.
Have you considered what it meant for Alia to be born into this universe fully cognitive, possessed of all her mother’s memories and knowledge? No rape could be more terrifying.
There can be only one answer, that completely accurate and total prediction is lethal.
A pure villain who delights only in creating pain and terror can be quite educational.”
They’re trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.”
“For them, mektub al mellah, as the Fremen say.” “The thing was written with salt,”
No, my concern goes to the development of humans as special weapons. Here is a virtually unlimited field which a few powers are developing.
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.
Truth suffers from too much analysis.
No matter her beauty, this Princess was flawed. Under that veneer of sexual attraction lived a whining shrew more interested in words than in actions.
Melange was valuable, but it exacted a price—addiction. It added years to a life—decades for some—but it was still just another way to die.
She represents ultimate tension. She is the virgin-harlot—witty, vulgar, cruel, as destructive in her whims as a coriolis storm.
“Four things cannot be hidden—love, smoke, a pillar of fire and a man striding across the open bled.”
“Before us, all methods of learning were tainted by instinct. We learned how to learn. Before us, instinct-ridden researchers possessed a limited attention span—often no longer than a single lifetime. Projects stretching across fifty or more lifetimes never occurred to them. The concept of total muscle/nerve training had not entered awareness.”
“If prescience alone existed and did everything, Sire, it would annihilate itself. Nothing but prescience? Where could it be applied except to its own degenerating movements?”
It is said one can always tell an aristocrat: he reveals only those of his vices which will make him popular.”
“Power tends to isolate those who hold too much of it. Eventually, they lose touch with reality . . . and fall.”
“You obviously are trained in all the lying tricks of statecraft, the double meanings and the power words. Language is nothing more than a weapon to you and, thus, you test my armor.”
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.”
And inside: here lay the true horror. How could he protect himself from himself?
“He didn’t kill them himself, Stil. He killed the way I kill, by sending out his legions. There’s another emperor I want you to note in passing—a Hitler. He killed more than six million. Pretty good for those days.”
“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—”
We must keep in mind that there’s more to religion and government than approving treaties and sermons.”
Here lies a toppled god— His fall was not a small one. We did but build his pedestal, A narrow and a tall one.
“You’ve no idea how we were taught!” “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.”
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.
