The spice must flow.
Power attracts the corruptible. Absolute power attracts the absolutely corruptible. This is the danger of entrenched bureaucracy to its subject population.
Individual human experience is not the overriding control factor in human behavior. The cellular social pattern dominates.
If you believe certain words, you believe their hidden arguments. When you believe something is right or wrong, true or false, you believe the assumptions in the words which express the arguments. Such assumptions are often full of holes, but remain most precious to the convinced. – The Open-Ended Proof from the Panoplia Prophetica Leto’s.
And again he remembered the vision of fanatic legions following the green and black banner of the Atreides, pillaging and burning across the universe in the name of their prophet Muad’Dib. That must not happen, he told himself.
It’s a subtle and powerful thing, prescience. The future becomes now. 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.
Paul confronted his son then, aiming the eyeless sockets at Leto. “Do you really know the universe you have created here?
Every question, every problem doesn’t have a single correct answer. One must permit diversity. A monolith is unstable.
I wrote the Dune series because I had this idea that charismatic leaders ought to come with a warning label on their forehead: “May be dangerous to your health.” One of the most dangerous presidents we had in this century was John Kennedy because people said “Yes Sir Mr. Charismatic Leader what do we do next?” and we wound up in Vietnam. And I think probably the most valuable president of this century was Richard Nixon. Because he taught us to distrust government and he did it by example.
You talk of prisons and police and legalities, the perfect illusions behind which a prosperous power structure can operate while observing, quite accurately, that it is above its own laws.
Moneo has discovered it is pointless to live in the past, impossible to live in the future, and difficult to live in the present.
And he realized with an abrupt sense shock that he had been giving more and more reliance to prescient memory and it had weakened him for this particular emergency.
Paul crawled through the sphincter.
In all Things you must appear important. No minor decisions pass through your hands unless they are quiet acts called ‘Favors’ done for people whose loyalty can be earned.
Enclosures of any kind are a fertile breeding ground for hatred of outsiders,” she said. “That produces a bitter harvest.
The human mind, as is the case with the mind of any animal, is a resonator. It responds to resonances in the environment.
Paul had been caught more by her tone – singsong and wavering – than by her words. “When you live upon Arrakis,” she had said, “khala, the land is empty. The moons will be your friends, the sun your enemy.” Paul had sensed his mother come up beside him away from her post guarding the door. She had looked at the Reverend Mother and asked: “Do you see no hope, Your Reverence?” “Not for the father.
What terrible things we do to those we love!
There are those among my young men who have reached the age of wild spirits,’ he said. ‘They must be eased through this period. I must leave no great reasons around for them to challenge me. Because I would have to maim and kill among them. This is not the proper course for a leader if it can be avoided with honor. A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and a people reverts to a mob.
In that instant, Paul saw how Stilgar had been transformed from the Fremen naib to a creature of the Lisan al-Gaib, a receptacle for awe and obedience. It was a lessening of the man, and Paul felt the ghost-wind of the jihad in it.