The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him.
Warfare leaves a residue of ‘eat drink and be merry’ that often leads inexorably to moral breakdown.
Can you remember your first taste of spice?” “It tasted like cinnamon.” “But never twice the same,” he said. “It’s like life – it presents a different face each time you take it. Some hold that the spice produces a learned-flavor reaction. The body, learning a thing is good for it, interprets the flavor as pleasurable – slightly euphoric. And, like life, never to be truly synthesized.
The mind can go either direction under stress – toward positive or toward negative:.
The historical system of mutual pillage and extortion stops here on Arrakis,” his father said. “You cannot go on forever stealing what you need without regard to those who come after. The physical qualities of a planet are written into its economic and political record.
Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit. This is the fine point on which all the legal professions of history have based their job security.
It’d be bad enough without the complication of a feudal trade culture which turns its back on most science.
But the tripod upon which Eternity swings is composed of flesh and thought and emotion.
I see the signs!” Jessica snapped. “My question was meant to remind you that you should not try to teach me those matters in which I instructed you.” Paul.
Shield!” the old woman snapped. “You well know the weakness there! Shield your son too much, Jessica, and he’ll not grow strong enough to fulfill any destiny.
The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed. We feel threatened by such demands. “I already know the important things!”we say. Then Changer comes.
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.
Myths are not fiction, but history seen with a poet’s eyes and recounted in a poet’s terms.
You can’t stop a mental epidemic. It leaps from person to person across parsecs. It’s overwhelmingly contagious. It strikes at the unprotected side, in the place where we lodge the fragments of other such plagues. Who can stop such a thing? Muad’dib hasn’t the antidote. The thing has roots in chaos. Can orders reach there?
Anything and anyone can fail,” he said, “but brave good friends help.
Laws tend to be temporary over the long haul, Moneo. There is no such thing as rule-governed creativity.
If you focus your awareness only upon your own rightness, then you invite the forces of opposition to overwhelm you. This is a common error. Even I, your teacher, have made it.
Surely you know bureaucracies always become voracious aristocracies after they attain commanding power.
Create or arouse such unbridled forces and you built carnal fantasies of enormous complexity. You could lead whole populations around by their desires, by their fantasy projections.
The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.′ And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning, ‘That path leads ever down into stagnation.