children of dune quotes

Church and State, scientific reason and faith, the individual and his
community, even progress and tradition -- all of these can be reconciled in the
teachings of Muad'Dib. He taught us that there exist no intransigent opposites
except in the beliefs of men. Anyone can rip aside the veil of Time. You can
discover the future in the past or in your own imagination. Doing this, you win
back your consciousness in your inner being. You know then that the universe is
a coherent whole and you are indivisible from it.

-The Preacher at Arrakeen, After Harq al-Ada

melange (me'-lange also ma,lanj) n-s, origin uncertain (thought to derive from
ancient Terran Franzh): a. mixture of spices; b. spice of Arrakis (Dune) with
geriatric properties first noted by Yanshuph Ashkoko, royal chemist in reign of
Shakkad the Wise; Arrakeen melange, found only in deepest desert sands of
Arrakis, linked to prophetic visions of Paul Muad'Dib (Atreides), first Fremen
Mahdi; also employed by Spacing Guild Navigators and the Bene Gesserit.

-Dictionary Royal fifth edition

The password was given to me by a man who died in the dungeons of Arrakeen. You
see, that is where I got this ring in the shape of a tortoise. It was in the
suk outside the city where I was hidden by the rebels. The password? Oh, that
has been changed many times since then. It was "Persistence." And the
countersign was "Tortoise." It got me out of there alive. That's why I bought
this ring: a reminder.

-Tagir Mohandis: Conversations with a Friend

The child who refuses to travel in the father's harness, this is the symbol of
man's most unique capability. "I do not have to be what my father was. I do not
have to obey my father's rules or even believe everything he believed. It is my
strength as a human that I can make my own choices of what to believe and what
not to believe, of what to be and what not to be."

-Leto Atreides II, The Harq al-Ada Biography

I saw his blood and a piece of his robe which had been ripped by sharp claws.
His sister reports vividly of the tigers, the sureness of their attack. We have
questioned one of the plotters, and others are dead or in custody. Everything
points to a Corrino plot. A Truthsayer has attested to this testimony.

-Stilgar's Report to the Landsraad Commission

You will learn the integrated communication methods as you complete the next
step in your mentat education. This is a gestalten function which will overlay
data paths in your awareness, resolving complexities and masses of input from
the mentat index-catalogue techniques which you already have mastered. Your
initial problem will be the breaking tensions arising from the divergent
assembly of minutiae/data on specialized subjects. Be warned. Without mentat
overlay integration, you can be immersed in the Babel Problem, which is the
label we give to the omnipresent dangers of achieving wrong combinations from
accurate information.

-The Mentat Handbook

Muad'Dib gave us a particular kind of knowledge about prophetic insight, about
the behavior which surrounds such insight and its influence upon events which
are seen to be "on line." (That is, events which are set to occur in a related
system which the prophet reveals and interprets.) As has been noted elsewhere,
such insight operates as a peculiar trap for the prophet himself. He can become
the victim of what he knows -- which is a relatively common human failing. The
danger is that those who predict real events may overtook the polarizing effect
brought about by overindulgence in their own truth. They tend to forget that
nothing in a polarized universe can exist without its opposite being present.

-The Prescient Vision, by Harq al-Ada

Above all else, the mentat must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise
to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and
specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit
picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The mentat-generalist, on the
other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not
cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in his universe. He
must remain capable of saying: "There's no real mystery about this at the
moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we'll correct
that when we come to it." The mentat-generalist must understand that anything
which we can identify as our universe is merely part of larger phenomena. But
the expert looks backward; he looks into the narrow standards of his own
specialty. The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles,
knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop. It is to the
characteristics of change itself that the mentat-generalist must look. There
can be no permanent catalogue of such change, no handbook or manual. You must
look at it with as few preconceptions as possible, asking yourself: "Now what
is this thing doing?"

-The Mentat Handbook

The one-eyed view of our universe says you must not look far afield for
problems. Such problems may never arrive. Instead, tend to the wolf within your
fences. The packs ranging outside may not even exist.

-The Azhar Book; Shamra I:4

We can still remember the golden days before Heisenberg, who showed humans the
walls enclosing our predestined arguments. The lives within me find this
amusing. Knowledge, you see, has no uses without purpose, but purpose is what
builds enclosing walls.

-Leto Atreides II, His Voice

The spirit of Muad'Dib is more than words, more than the letter of the Law
which arises in his name. Muad'Dib must always be that inner outrage against
the complacently powerful, against the charlatans and the dogmatic fanatics. It
is that inner outrage which must have its say because Muad'Dib taught us one
thing above all others: that humans can endure only in a fraternity of social
justice.

-The Fedaykin Compact

The life of a single human, as the life of a family or an entire people,
persists as memory. My people must come to see this as part of their maturing
process. They are people as organism, and in this persistent memory they store
more and more experiences in a subliminal reservoir. Humankind hopes to call
upon this material if it is needed for a changing universe. But much that is
stored can be lost in that chance play of accident which we call "fate." Much
may not be integrated into evolutionary relationships, and thus may not be
evaluated and keyed into activity by those ongoing environmental changes which
inflict themselves upon flesh. The species can forget! This is the special
value of the Kwisatz Haderach which the Bene Gesserits never suspected: the
Kwisatz Haderach cannot forget.

-The Book of Leto, After Harq al-Ada

Limits of survival are set by climate, those long drifts of change which a
generation may fail to notice. And it is the extremes of climate which set the
pattern. Lonely, finite humans may observe climatic provinces, fluctuations of
annual weather and, occasionally may observe such things as "This is a colder
year than I've ever known. " Such things are sensible. But humans are seldom
alerted to the shifting average through a great span of years. And it is
precisely in this alerting that humans learn how to survive on any planet. They
must learn climate.

-Arrakis, the Transformation, After Harq al-Ada

O Paul, thou Muad'Dib,
Mahdi of all men,
Thy breath exhaled
Sent forth the hurricane.

-Songs of Muad'Dib

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.

-Liet-Kynes, The Arrakis Workbook

It is commonly reported, my dear Georad, that there exists great natural virtue
in the melange experience. Perhaps this is true. There remain within me,
however, profound doubts that every use of melange always brings virtue. Me
seems that certain persons have corrupted the use of melange in defiance of
God. In the words of the Ecumenon, they have disfigured the soul. They skim the
surface of melange and believe thereby to attain grace. They deride their
fellows, do great harm to godliness, and they distort the meaning of this
abundant gift maliciously, surely a mutilation beyond the power of man to
restore. To be truly at one with the virtue of the spice, uncorrupted in all
ways, full of goodly honor, a man must permit his deeds and his words to agree.
When your actions describe a system of evil consequences, you should be judged
by those consequences and not by your explanations. It is thus that we should
judge Muad'Dib.

-The Pedant Heresy

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

As with so many other religions, Muad'Dib's Golden Elixir of Life degenerated
into external wizardry. Its mystical signs became mere symbols for deeper
psychological processes, and those processes, of course, ran wild. What they
needed was a living god, and they didn't have one, a situation which Muad'Dib's
son has corrected.

-Saying attributed to Lu Tung-pin, (Lu, The Guest of the Cavern)

In this age when the means of human transport include devices which can span
the deeps of space in transtime, and other devices which can carry men swiftly
over virtually impassable planetary surfaces, it seems odd to think of
attempting long journeys afoot. Yet this remains a primary means of travel on
Arrakis, a fact attributed partly to preference and partly to the brutal
treatment which this planet reserves for anything mechanical. In the strictures
of Arrakis, human flesh remains the most durable and reliable resource for the
Hajj. Perhaps it is the implicit awareness of this fact which makes Arrakis the
ultimate mirror of the soul.

-Handbook of the Hajj

Only in the realm of mathematics can you understand Muad'Dib's precise view of
the future. Thus: first, we postulate any number of point-dimensions in space.
(This is the classic n-fold extended aggregate of n dimensions.) With this
framework, Time as commonly understood becomes an aggregate of one-dimensional
properties. Applying this to the Muad'Dib phenomenon, we find that we either
are confronted by new properties of Time or (by reduction through the infinity
calculus) we are dealing with separate systems which contain n body properties.
For Muad'Dib, we assume the latter. As demonstrated by the reduction, the point
dimensions of the n-fold can only have separate existence within different
frameworks of Time. Separate dimensions of Time are thus demonstrated to
coexist. This being the inescapable case, Muad'Dib's predictions required that
he perceive the n-fold not as extended aggregate but as an operation within a
single framework. In effect, he froze his universe into that one framework
which was his view of Time.

-Palimbasha: Lectures at Sietch Tabr

The Fremen must return to his original faith, to his genius in forming human
communities; he must return to the past, where that lesson of survival was
learned in the struggle with Arrakis. The only business of the Fremen should be
that of opening his soul to the inner teachings. The worlds of the Imperium,
the Landsraad and the CHOAM Confederacy have no message to give him. They will
only rob him of his soul.

-The Preacher at Arrakeen

You have loved Caladan
And lamented its lost host --
But pain discovers
New lovers cannot erase
Those forever ghost.

-Refrain from The Habbanya Lament

CHALLENGE: "Have you seen The Preacher?"
RESPONSE: "I have seen a sandworm."
CHALLENGE: "What about that sandworm?"
RESPONSE: "It gives us the air we breathe."
CHALLENGE: "Then why do we destroy its land?"
RESPONSE: "Because Shai-Hulud [sandworm deified] orders it."

-Riddles of Arrakis by Harq al-Ada

In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain
and maintain power through the use of words. From witch doctor to priest to
bureaucrat it is all the same. A governed populace must be conditioned to
accept power-words as actual things, to confuse the symbolized system with the
tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain
symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding -- symbols such as
those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local
interpretation of sanity. Symbol-secrecy of this form leads to the development
of fragmented sub-languages, each being a signal that its users are
accumulating some form of power. With this insight into a power process, our
Imperial Security Force must be ever alert to the formation of sub-languages.

-Lecture to the Arrakeen War College by, The Princess Irulan

I hear the wind blowing across the desert and I see the moons of a winter night
rising tike great ships in the void. To them I make my vow: I will be resolute
and make an art of government; I will balance my inherited past and become a
perfect storehouse of my relic memories. And I will be known for kindliness
more than for knowledge. My face will shine down the corridors of time for as
long as humans exist.

-Leto's Vow, After Harq al-Ada

The assumption that humans exist within an essentially impermanent universe,
taken as an operational precept, demands that the intellect become a totally
aware balancing instrument. But the intellect cannot react thus without
involving the entire organism. Such an organism may be recognized by its
burning, driving behavior. And thus it is with a society treated as organism.
But here we encounter an old inertia. Societies move to the goading of ancient,
reactive impulses. They demand permanence. Any attempt to display the universe
of impermanence arouses rejection patterns, fear, anger, and despair. Then how
do we explain the acceptance of prescience? Simply: the giver of prescient
visions, because he speaks of an absolute (permanent) realization, may be
greeted with joy by humankind even while predicting the most dire events.

-The Book of Leto, After Harq al-Ada

And he saw a vision of armor. The armor was not his own skin; it was stronger
than plasteel. Nothing penetrated his armor -- not knife or poison or sand, not
the dust of the desert or its desiccating heat. In his right hand he carried
the power to make the Coriolis storm, to shake the earth and erode it into
nothing. His eyes were fixed upon the Golden Path and in his left hand he
carried the scepter of absolute mastery. And beyond the Golden Path, his eyes
looked into eternity which he knew to be the food of his soul and of his
everlasting flesh.

-Heighia, My Brother's Dream from The Book of Ghanima

A Fremen dies when he is too long from the desert; this we call "the water
sickness."

-Stilgar, the Commentaries

This was Muad'Dib's achievement: He saw the subliminal reservoir of each
individual as an unconscious bank of memories going back to the primal cell of
our common genesis. Each of us, he said, can measure out his distance from that
common origin. Seeing this and telling of it, he made the audacious leap of
decision. Muad'Dib set himself the task of integrating genetic memory into
ongoing evaluation. Thus did he break through Time's veils, making a single
thing of the future and the past. That was Muad'Dib's creation embodied in his
son and his daughter.

-Testament of Arrakis by Harq al-Ada

A sophisticated human can become primitive. What this really means is that the
human's way of life changes. Old values change, become linked to the landscape
with its plants and animals. This new existence requires a working knowledge of
those multiplex and cross-linked events usually referred to as nature. It
requires a measure of respect for the inertial power within such natural
systems. When a human gains this working knowledge and respect, that is called
“being primitive.” The converse, of course, is equally true: the primitive can
become sophisticated, but not without accepting dreadful psychological damage.

-The Leto Commentary, After Harq al-Ada