Highlights from Dune by Frank Herbert Last read on May 31, 2021
Highlights from this book
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Ecology is the study of consequences.
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What do you despise? By this you are truly known.
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And I stood upon the sand of the sea and saw a beast rise up out of the sea.. and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.
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This man who believes he cannot be bought. See him detained there by a million shares of himself sold in dribbles every second of his life! If you took him up now and shook him, he'd rattle inside. Emptied! Sold out! What difference how he dies now.
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The way to control and direct a mentat, Nefud, is through his information. False information -- false results.
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Paul stirred the savage beating of his heart, set his mind as a blank slate upon which the past few moments could write themselves.
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These are ashes, these are roots.
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The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture -- it begins in the dignity with which we treat our dead.
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The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.
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Deep in the human unconcious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step from logic.
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There's an internally recognized beauty of motion and balance on any man healthy planet. You see in this beauty a dynamic stabilizing effect essential to all life. It's aim is simple to maintain and produce coordinated patterns of greater and greater diversity. Life improves the closed system's capacity to sustain life. Life -- all life -- is in the service of life. Necessary nutrients are made available by life BY life in greater and greater richness. As the diversity of life increases. the entire landscape comes alive, filled with relationships and relationships within relationships.
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Kynes was not a madman totally, just mad enough to be holy.
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We shouldn't have tried to create new symbols. We should have realized we weren't supposed to introduce uncertainties into accepted belief, that we weren't supposed to stir up curiosity about god. We are daily confronted by the terrifying instability of all things human, yet we permit our religions to grow more rigid and controlled, now conforming and oppressive. What is this shadow across the highway of divine command? It is a warning that institutions endure, that symbols endure when their meaning is lost, that there is no summa of all attainable knowledge.
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Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves 'I am not the kind of man I ought to be'. It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.
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When law and religion are one, your selfdom encloses the universe.
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When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until its too late.
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You cannot avoid the interplay of politics within an orthodox religion. This power struggle permeates the training education and discipline of the Orthodox community. Because of this pressue, the leaders of such a community inevitably must face the ultimate internal question: to succumb to complete opportunism as the price of maintaining their rule, or risk sacrificing themselves for the sake of the Orthodox ethic.