Children of Dune (Dune #3)

by Frank Herbert

“Too much knowledge never makes for simple decisions.”

Oh, to be as others were—blind in that safest of all blindnesses, living only the hypnoidal half-life into which birth-shock precipitated most humans.

Alia saw nothing strange in loving and hating her mother simultaneously.

It was a necessity, a required balance without room for guilt or blame. Where could loving or hating stop?

What good was served by calling up old lifetimes and rubbing their mistakes together? This was a new lifetime.

Nature’s beauteous form Contains a lovely essence Called by some—decay. By this lovely presence New life finds its way. Tears shed silently Are but water of the soul: They bring new life To the pain of being— A separation from that seeing Which death makes whole.

the universe was a place of constant conversation between animal populations.

“Would that he were only Gabriel without a horn.”

They were a magnet in the void; evil and all the sad misuses of power collected around them.

“The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth.”

These are illusions of popular history which a successful religion must promote: Evil men never prosper; only the brave deserve the fair; honesty is the best policy; actions speak louder than words; virtue always triumphs; a good deed is its own reward; any bad human can be reformed; religious talismans protect one from demon possession; only females understand the ancient mysteries; the rich are doomed to unhappiness .

Those who sought the future hoped to gain the winning gamble on tomorrow’s race. Instead they found themselves trapped into a lifetime whose every heartbeat and anguished wail was known.

“The joy of living, its beauty is all bound up in the fact that life can surprise you,”

“People often learn subtlety as they age,” Leto said. “What is it we’re learning with all of this agedness to draw upon?”

“There’s something beyond subtlety,” she said. “We must have a place in our awareness to perceive what we can’t preconceive.

“Most deadly errors arise from obsolete assumptions,”

“Governments may rise and fall for reasons which appear insignificant, Prince. What small events! An argument between two women . . . which way the wind blows on a certain day . . . a sneeze, a cough, the length of a garment or the chance collision of a fleck of sand and a courtier’s eye. It is not always the majestic concerns of Imperial ministers which dictate the course of history, nor is it necessarily the pontifications of priests which move the hands of God.”

And if you handed one of them the complete scenario of his life, the unvarying dialogue up to his moment of death—what a hellish gift that’d be. What utter boredom! Every living instant he’d be replaying what he knew absolutely. No deviation. He could anticipate every response, every utterance—over and over and over and over and over and . . .”

“We’ve lost something vital, I tell you. When we lost it, we lost the ability to make good decisions. We fall upon decisions these days the way we fall upon an enemy—or wait and wait, which is a form of giving up, and we allow the decisions of others to move us. Have we forgotten that we were the ones who set this current flowing?”

stasis was the most dangerous of those things which were not natural. The only permanence was fluid. Change was all that mattered.

The dead should remain dead. It was correct to find one’s immortality in children, but children had no right to assume too exact a shape from their past.

To be sighted in the land of the blind carries its own perils. If you try to interpret what you see for the blind, you tend to forget that the blind possess an inherent movement conditioned by their blindness. They are like a monstrous machine moving along its own path. They have their own momentum, their own fixations. I fear the blind, Stil. I fear them. They can so easily crush anything in their path.”

“If I always behave with propriety, no matter what it costs me to suppress my own desires, then that is the measure of me.” “Such is the essence of self-control, youngster.”

Change was dangerous. Invention must be suppressed. Individual willpower must be denied. What other function did the priesthood serve than to deny individual will?

Dangerous or not, there would be change. The beautiful young Fremen knew this. They could look outward and see it, prepare for it.

“To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror; to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.”

“Memories are not enough. When you try the hardest, just then, you most often fail.”

Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.

This is the age of the shrug. He knows I’ve heard all the stories about him and he doesn’t care. Our civilization could well die of indifference within it before succumbing to external attack.

When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.

Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class—whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.

How casually it obliterated men. It was done without a second thought. The mainspring of a religious insanity had been wound tight and left ticking.

“You aren’t thinking or really existing unless you’re willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgment of your existence.”

Light was too much order and that can be fatal.

Because of the one-pointed Time awareness in which the conventional mind remains immersed, humans tend to think of everything in a sequential, word-oriented framework. This mental trap produces very short-term concepts of effectiveness and consequences, a condition of constant, unplanned response to crises.

His memory was a lens, an illuminating searchlight which picked out fragments, isolating them, but forever failing to stop the ceaseless motion and modification which surged into his view.

“We must negate the machines-that-think. Humans must set their own guidelines. This is not something machines can do. Reasoning depends upon programming, not on hardware, and we are the ultimate program!”

“Our Jihad is a ‘dump program.’ We dump the things which destroy us as humans!”

‘In doing good, avoid notoriety; in doing evil, avoid self-awareness.’”

He could not grasp his new universe in motionless, labeled bits. No bit would stand still. Things could not be forever ordered and formulated. He had to find the rhythm of change and see between the changes to the changing itself.

“The malady of indifference is what destroys many things,”

“You are a child seeking to be a man. When you are a man, you will seek in vain for the child you were.”

“To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.”

There’s no mystery about a human life. It’s not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”

“Irreverence is a most necessary ingredient of religion,”

“There’s no mighty seat of reason which dwells within the brain. Creation is discovery.

God discovered us in the Void because we moved against a background which He already knew. The wall was blank. Then there was movement.”

Beware paths which narrow future possibilities. Such paths divert you from infinity into lethal traps.”

The major object of priestly study is to find the correct forms of human behavior.

Every question, every problem doesn’t have a single correct answer. One must permit diversity. A monolith is unstable.