The ultimate question: Why does life exist? The answer: For life's sake.
-ANONYMOUS, thought to be of Zensunni origin
The ultimate question: Why does life exist? The answer: For life's sake.
-ANONYMOUS, thought to be of Zensunni origin
Like the knowledge of your own being, the sietch forms a firm base from which
you move out into the world and into the universe.
-Fremen Teaching
All persons are contained within a single individual, just as all time is in a
moment, and the entire universe is in a grain of sand.
-Fremen Saying
When faced with necessary actions, there are always choices. So long as the
job gets done.
-COUNT HASIMIR FENRING,
Dispatches from Arrakis
A requirement of creativity is that it contributes to change. Creativity keeps
the creator alive.
-FRANK HERBERT, unpublished notes
Among the responsibilities of command is the necessity to punish . . . but only
when the victim demands it.
-PRINCE RAPHAEL CORRINO, Discourses on Leadership in a Galactic Imperium, 12th
Edition
Who can know whether Ix has gone too far? They hide their facilities, keep
their workers enslaved, and claim the right of secrecy. Under such
circumstances, how can they not be tempted to step beyond the restrictions of
the Butlerian Jihad?
-COUNT ILBAN RICHESE, third appeal to the Landsraad
Four things cannot be hidden -- Love, smoke, a pillar of fire, and a man
striding across the open bled.
-Fremen Wisdom
In the Imperium there exists the "principle of the individual," noble but
rarely utilized, whereby a person who violates a written law in a situation of
extreme peril or need can request a special session of the court of
jurisdiction in order to explain and support the necessity of his actions. A
number of legal procedures derive from this principle, among them the Drey
Jury, the Blind Tribunal, and the Trial by Forfeiture.
-Law of the Imperium: Commentaries
Blindness can take many forms other than the inability to see. Fanatics are
often blinded in their thoughts. Leaders are often blinded in their hearts.
-The Orange Catholic Bible
One observes the survivors, and learns from them.
-Bene Gesserit Teaching
No outsider has ever seen a Tleilaxu female and lived to tell about it.
Considering the Tleilaxu penchant for genetic manipulation -- see, e.g.,
related memos on clones and gholas -- this simple observation raises a wealth
of additional questions.
-Bene Gesserit Analysis
The highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.
-PARDOT KYNES, Ecology of Bela Tegeuse, Initial Report to the Imperium
Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.
-Chief commandment resulting from the Butlerian Jihad, found in the Orange
Catholic Bible
There are weapons you cannot hold in your hand. You can only hold them in your
mind.
-Bene Gesserit Teaching
The populace must think their ruler is a greater man than they, else why should
they follow him? Above all a leader must be a showman, giving his people the
bread and circuses they require.
-DUKE PAULUS ATREIDES
In response to the strict Butlerian taboo against machines that perform mental
functions, a number of schools developed enhanced human beings to subsume most
of the functions formerly performed by computers. Some of the key schools
arising out of the Jihad include the Bene Gesserit, with their intense mental
and physical training, the Spacing Guild, with the prescient ability to find a
safe path through foldspace, and the Mentats, whose computerlike minds are
capable of extraordinary acts of reasoning.
-Ikbhan's Treatise on the Mind, Volume I
Speak the truth. That is always much easier, and is often the most powerful
argument.
-Bene Gesserit Axiom
The slave concubines permitted my father under the Bene Gesserit-Guild
agreement could not, of course, bear a Royal Successor, but the intrigues were
constant and oppressive in their similarity. We became adept, my mother and
sisters and I, at avoiding subtle instruments of death.
-From "In My Father's House"
by the Princess Irulan
How simple things were when our Messiah was only a dream.
-STILGAR, Naib of Sietch Tabr
Like many culinary delicacies, revenge is a dish best savored slowly, after
long and delicate preparation.
-EMPEROR ELROOD IX,
Deathbed Insights
The human body is a machine, a system of organic chemicals, fluid conduits,
electrical impulses; a government is likewise a machine of interacting
societies, laws, cultures, rewards and punishments, patterns of behavior.
Ultimately, the universe itself is a machine, planets around suns, stars
gathered into clusters, clusters and other suns forming entire galaxies . . . .
Our job is to keep the machinery functioning.
-Suk Inner School, Primary Doctrine
We consider the various worlds as gene pools, sources of teachings and
teachers, sources of the possible.
-Bene Gesserit Analysis,
Wallach IX Archives
The paintbrush of history has depicted Abulurd Harkonnen in a most unfavorable
light. Judged by the standards of his older half brother, Baron Vladimir, and
his own children Glossu Rabban and Feyd-Rautha Rabban, Abulurd was a different
sort of man entirely. We must, however, assess the frequent descriptions of
his weakness, incompetence, and foolhardy decisions in light of the ultimate
failure of House Harkonnen. Though exiled to Lankiveil and stripped of any
real power, Abulurd secured a victory unmatched by anyone else in his extended
family: He learned how to be happy with his life.
-Landsraad Encyclopedia of Great Houses, post-Jihad edition
It's easier to be terrified by an enemy you admire.
-THUFIR HAWAT, Mentat and Security Commander to House Atreides
Kwisatz Haderach: "Shortening of the Way." This is the label applied by the
Bene Gesserit to the unknown for which they sought a genetic solution: a male
Bene Gesserit whose organic mental powers would bridge space and time.
-Terminology of the Imperium
Many elements of the Imperium believe they hold the ultimate power: the
Spacing Guild with their monopoly on interstellar travel, CHOAM with its
economic stranglehold, the Bene Gesserit with their secrets, the Mentats with
their control of mental processes, House Corrino with their throne, the Great
and Minor Houses of the Landsraad with their extensive holdings. Woe to us on
the day that one of those factions decides to prove the point.
-COUNT HASIMIR FENRING,
Dispatches from Arrakis
History has seldom been good to those who must be punished. Bene Gesserit
punishments cannot be forgotten.
-Bene Gesserit Dictum
The written Law of the Imperium cannot be changed, no matter which Great House
holds dominion or which Emperor sits on the Golden Lion Throne. The documents
of the Imperial Constitution have been established for thousands of years.
This is not to say that each regime is legally identical; the variations stem
from subtleties of interpretation and from microscopic loopholes that become
large enough to drive a Heighliner through.
-Law of the Imperium: Commentaries and Rebuttals
Imperfections, if viewed in the proper light, can be extremely valuable. The
Great Schools, with their incessant questing for perfection, often find this
postulate difficult to understand, until it is proven to them that nothing in
the universe is random.
-From The Philosophies of Old Terra, one of the recovered manuscripts