Dune: Famous Quotes

Which of the litanies, axioms, and proverbs hold up best?

Jude: We’re back this week to look at famous quotes from Dune. As we did last week with Lord of the Rings, we’ll run through the top Goodreads quotes and consider what each can tell us about Frank Herbert and his novel.

Thomas: And we’ll nitpick whenever we can.

Jude: Yes, there’ll be lots of that too. Let’s get started.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Jude: This has got to be the most famous Dune quote, the litany against fear. Most of what Paul does involves powers achieved via eugenics, or at least thousands of hours of practice, but this is much more practical and something readers to try to use themselves. Recite this mantra and try to calm down.

Thomas: The first two sentences are short and memorable. Then it gets a lot more wordy than seems necessary or helpful.

Jude: Maybe so, but a lot of people online self-report that it actually works! Dune isn’t just a thrilling work of science fiction, it’s a practical self-help book.

Thomas: The real question is does it work better than any other mantra. Have there been any studies? Maybe you could make a double-blind study by giving teenagers copies of Dune with the real litany replaced by other litanies.

Jude: I looked, and there are some pop psych articles that try to talk about it scientifically, but nothing in a peer reviewed journal as far as I could find. And maybe the wordiness is a feature? The business about over and through and turning might help the mind focus on these mental images instead of whatever is causing fear or anxiety.

Thomas: If there’s any psychology PhD students out there looking for a dissertation topic, here it is, no charge, but please cite us in your papers about this.

The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.

Jude: The Reverend Mother says this to Paul. It sounds wise.

Thomas: This is the way an allegedly wise person says they don’t actually know the answer. I was already experiencing life and reality before I met you. Thanks for nothing.

Jude: I guess it’s saying you can’t find a solution, so you should stop trying?

Thomas: Then just say that!

Jude: Or maybe it’s something more like “life is about the journey, not the destination”

Thomas: Could be! It’s very unclear, isn’t it?

“A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.”

Jude: This is the aphorism Paul offers in answer to the previous one. The book tells us this is the “First Law of Mentat”. It’s not bad, though a little less poetic than hers.

Thomas: Apparently Gandalf was a mentat, because this seems so close to his line about breaking a thing to understand it that you wonder if Herbert had it in mind when he wrote this.

Jude: You were full of criticism of Gandalf for that line, so I suppose you’re unhappy about it here, too.

Thomas: This one is much narrower since it’s talking about processes, not things, but it still seems, you know, false. Or else we wouldn’t ever understand something better by taking a photograph of it.

Jude: This one gets close to a theme of the book that was very important to Herbert but which hasn’t, I don’t think, made much of an impact on readers: the idea that there isn’t a “natural world” distinct from the human sphere, but rather humans are just parts of an overall “planetary system” that’s always changing and evolving. But maybe people don’t notice it because it is taken for granted now that humanity impacts the ecosystem of the world around us.

Thomas: Perhaps, but I think Herbert would look askance at the still-prevalent ideas that the best environment is one that is untouched by humanity, that the climate before human influence is the “correct” climate, and so on. I take him here and elsewhere as trying to say there’s no point trying to see humans and the natural world as separate in any way.

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”

Jude: This is the first of many quotes we’re going to be considering from Princess Irulan. Lots of people seem to like these quotes, but I think it’s an open question whether they are supposed to be taken as wise.

Thomas: Herbert’s very clever with these. If you think they’re wise, great, but if not, hey, Princess Irulan is this bookish woman trapped in a marriage of convenience shoveling out propaganda for Paul’s regime, so within the story there’s a reason they’re not actually wise. Very different than when Gandalf says something dumb.

Anyway, this particular one is kind of funny because it’s saying humans want the universe to be logical, but it’s locating that need deep in the human unconscious, the part we usually say isn’t rational or logical.

Jude: The universe seems pretty logical to me. The real one that is, not one where the spice melange can induce a prophetic trance.

Thomas: Herbert’s universe might be more logical than ours. In our world, I think most people accept that there’s a lot of contingency to history. Some kind of war would probably happen in Europe in the early twentieth century if Franz Ferdinand’s driver doesn’t make a wrong turn, but it could have been a very different war. Frank Herbert though is really big on the big, impersonal forces of history.

Jude: If you’re thinking of the sequels with their human stasis and Golden Path, surely God-Emperor of Dune is a big endorsement of the Great Man theory of history? Or at least the Great Worm theory of history, I guess?

Thomas: Even there, setting up the Golden Path is only possible because human society behaves predictably in response to conditions, so intentional sociological engineering is possible. It’s Asimovian psychohistory, just with a much more offbeat version of Hari Seldon.

What do you despise? By this are you truly known.

Jude: This was apparently something Princess Irulan needed to say in her “Manual of Maud’dib”.

Thomas: That hasn’t aged well. Video games don’t have manuals at all now and Ikea furniture just gives you cryptic pictograms.

Jude: The quote itself seems like a forecast of what American politics has become, though. It’s all about negative polarization.

Thomas: What I despise is when drivers don’t line up in the turn lane and instead go all the way to the intersection, then sit there with their blinker on blocking a through lane as they try to cut in line. There. Now you really know me.

There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors.

Jude: This is Princess Irulan again, attributing this to Maud’dib. Surely you’ll agree this one is true.

Thomas: I don’t. There’s all kinds of people who have escaped paying for the violence of their ancestors. And good thing! I don’t care where you’re from; every human’s ancestors were extremely violent.

Jude: He’s talking about cycles of violence and retribution, I assume. These are really common.

Thomas: But they can end! No one is killing anyone in Northern Ireland anymore, thank goodness.

Jude: Maybe someone paid for that earlier violence already?

Thomas: But if we’re talking about cycles of blood feud, the way out is to stop paying for it and just let it go. That’s really hard, but that’s how you get to better times. Since Maud’dib carried out a bloody vengeance on his family’s killers and then led an interstellar jihad, it’s convenient to him (and to Frank Herbert’s prisoner-of-fate plot arc through Dune Messiah) to say violence is inescapable. But it’s not a foregone conclusion and even if it’s hard, we should be aspiring to do this more and more!

Jude: In context, I don’t think Paul would be talking about his own ancestors since his father was a victim, not a perpetrator. Maybe he’s talking about the ancestors of the Fremen?

Thomas: Fremen culture is implausibly violent, but as I understand it, they had to make some sort of Mormon-like pilgrimage to Arrakis to escape persecution, so they also were victims. I think the best we can do is say that as an apologist for the regime, Irulan is saying the people conquered in the jihad had it coming.

When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong - faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late.

Jude: This is Jessica stating a “Bene Gesserit proverb” that gets close to stating another core thesis of the story. I don’t think it’s too surprising now, but it might have stood out more in 1965’s much more religious America. In the context of the story, it seems both obviously right but also beside the point: Paul doesn’t worry much about Jessica and Gurney’s unease with his religious role. So readers can dwell on this or ignore it as they choose.

Thomas: Paul says that jihad is inevitable, so I guess we have to accept it, but it all plays out in his prophetic visions and those are mostly off the page. Intuitively, you’d think there’d be plenty of leverage in early moments of a messianic movement. Paul (and I guess Herbert) says no: if Paul dies or gives up, the Fremen still go on their offworld jihad. I wish this came out more in the actual story, though. We’re mostly told this, not shown it. Without Paul’s powers and connections, it’s hard to understand why there aren’t futures where the Fremen end up staying on their slow terraforming path.

Jude: It’s funny that the Bene Gesserit have a proverb warning against using religion in politics when in this case they have somehow planted the religion, or at least the messianic elements, into the Fremen culture. If you think this is a bad idea, you shouldn’t have done that! But it’s a good proverb at least.

Thomas: Is it, though? Like the litany, there’s good imagery but it’s too wordy for my taste. Also, I don’t think it’s true.

Jude: “Theocracies are good, actually” is certainly a hot take.

Thomas: I think people excited about political movements can “put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice” without any help from religion. Most nasty political movements in history had a religious element because most people in history were religious. But starting a few hundred years ago we started experimenting with secular politics and we still have come up with all sorts of bad outcomes.

Many have marked the speed with which Muad'Dib learned the necessities of Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit, of course, know the basis of this speed. For the others, we can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.

Jude: More Princess Irulan. Sometimes people quote it with just the next to last sentence since that’s a lot more pithy. I suppose you’re going to say this one is wrong somehow also.

Thomas: This one actually is quite ahead of its time, it seems to me, anticipating Carol Dweck’s “growth mindset” idea in educational psychology and the idea of “grit” as a personality trait. There’s some controversy about how well these concepts can be applied in education and I certainly don’t have the expertise to weigh in on that, but these are ideas that got going—in their scientific forms at least—in the 90s, so it’s interesting to see Princess Irulan giving a version of it decades earlier.

Jude: Frank Herbert: unique genius.

Thomas: Or maybe this stuff was being bandied about by a lot of people back then and it was only systematized recently?

Hope clouds observation.

Jude: The Reverend Mother says this to herself when testing Paul. It’s pretty basic but seems reasonable.

Thomas: Sure. This one I will approve as being appropriately pithy and true.

Jude: It’s not super-interesting, but I think in combination with other lines we’ve seen here, it’s notable that Herbert was trying to write his characters as people who had learned, remembered, and tried to wield these aphorisms.

Maybe that seems kind of obvious, but I think it distinguishes him from modern writers and also, I think, from his contemporaries. Most science fiction writers don’t think to invent sayings like this and, if they mention them at all, they often just lazily use things in circulation today. “Wasn’t there a writer from the late twentieth century who said…”

The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.

Thomas: Now this one is great! Not really actionable, but definitely pithy and, more importantly, it makes a philosophically interesting observation about the world that’s quite thought-provoking! Definitely a work of genius!

Jude: Okay, okay, as you obviously already know, Jessica says this to herself, but the text notes she’s quoting St. Augustine, so Frank Herbert doesn’t get credit for writing it. Instead he gets credit for reading it and having her quote it. Or are you going to claim you read St. Augustine all the time and knew this quote already?

Thomas: No, you’re right, I definitely didn’t. Do you think people twenty thousand of years from now are still going to be quoting St. Augustine?

Jude: Probably not, but at least it’s a quote that’s already lasted fifteen hundred years!

Thomas: Let’s see a fuller version of the quote from its original source.

The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance. The mind commands the hand to move, and it so easy that one hardly distinguishes the order from its execution. Yet mind is mind and hand is body. The mind orders the mind to will. The recipient of the order is itself, yet it does not perform it.

Jude: That’s from his Confessions.

Thomas: We aren’t here to discuss the memoirs of saints, but this is a pretty interesting observation. I guess it prefigures the idea of an unconscious.

“The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.”

Jude: This one is a “Bene Gesserit axiom” that Jessica thinks to herself while she and Paul are in the desert and Paul is suddenly taking charge. Maybe you’ll say it’s wordy again.

Thomas: No, it’s not trying to be a pithy aphorism, it’s just summarizing a scientific truth. Or at least, a scientific “truth”. It sounds psychologically informed but…again, is this really true?

Jude: Some people stay calm under stress. Training helps you stay calm. I think it checks out? What would you say instead?

Thomas: It posits a binary and says the mind will do one of them under stress, which seems tautological. But whatever, if it’s a fancy way of saying “some people rise to the occasion in crunch time” then fine, I’ll accept it.

He who controls the spice controls the universe.

Jude: It seemed necessary to include this since it’s maybe the most famous quote from Dune and is on the Goodreads list but, alas, it’s not from the book. It’s from the David Lynch movie, so we don’t need to discuss it.

Thomas: We don’t need to, but this one is bad too.

Jude: Silly me. Of course it is. What could possibly be wrong with this?

Thomas: It’s not true! Think about it. Spice was already an oil metaphor when Herbert wrote it. Lynch made his movie after the oil embargo of the 70s.

Jude: And?

Thomas: Who controlled the world of 1980? Hint: it was not Saudi Arabia.

Jude: Saudi Arabia was getting, and has continued to get, enormously, monstrously rich.

Thomas: Yes, but that’s not what the quote says. OPEC was able to annoy the United States with their embargo and arguably prevent Jimmy Carter from being reelected, but the US and the Soviet Union were still in charge. To the extent anyone was in charge. And really, no one was in charge!

Jude: I suppose there were a lot of conspiracy theories about Saudi influence on George W. Bush and the Iraq war. If you accept those, maybe they do control the universe, they’re just secretive about it. Very Herbert-ian if so. Plans within plans and all that.

Thomas: I definitely don’t buy it. The Saudis are struggling just to control professional golf. If it said, “he who controls the spice can buy a Premier League team” I would accept it.

Jude: Fair enough. But as we said, that quote isn’t from Herbert. Let’s see what the real book says about this topic.

The people who can destroy a thing, they control it.

Jude: Paul says this to Gurney.

Thomas: Now this—

Jude: Hang on.

He who can destroy a thing has the real control of it.

Jude: Paul says this to Jessica and Chani later.

Thomas: Right, and—

Jude: Still not done.

The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.

Jude: Paul says this to the Emperor. These three quotes are not only in the same book, they’re within about a hundred pages of each other. Frank Herbert really wanted us to get this point.

Thomas: These are much better than the Lynch version. It posits Paul controls the spice, not the universe. If he could control the universe with the spice, presumably it wouldn’t have been necessary for the Fremen to fight a huge jihad. Although now that I mention it, it’s not obvious to me why they had to fight the jihad at all. Wasn’t Paul’s marriage to Irulan part of a coup that put him atop the empire?

Jude: I think a lot of planets didn’t go along with it and had to be beaten into submission. The new Villeneuve movie puts in a line to make this explicit.

Thomas: But then why bother with the political marriage at all, then?

Jude: Maybe some of them did go along with it? Or maybe it was the marriage that got the Spacing Guild to cooperate? That would make it necessary since you need them to transport your Fremen warriors.

Thomas: But if it was necessary, then Paul dying before that point would have stopped the jihad.

Jude: All I can say is the Frank Herbert didn’t really care about these details or else he would have put it on the page.

I'll miss the sea, but a person needs new experiences. They jar something deep inside, allowing him to grow. Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.

Jude: People also quote this one and it’s not from the book either. I assume it’s also from the Lynch movie. Paul’s father says it, I believe.

Thomas: This one at least looks like a Herbert quote with a pithy core, “the sleeper must awaken”, surrounded by a bit more words than are necessary. Also, we go from “a person” to “him” to “us” to “the sleeper”. Pretty confusing.

Jude: “Change is good, stasis is bad” is a core concept of later Dune sequels so at least it’s in line with Herbert’s thinking.

Thomas: Yes, but it’s such a strange thing for Duke Leto to say about leaving Caladan. He’s not trying to grow as a person, he’s making a chess move in a dangerous game of political intrigue.

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

Jude: The Reverend Mother says this early in the book to Paul. Dune was way ahead of its time worrying about AI.

Thomas: Yes, although these days people are more worried about the machines themselves enslaving us. The quote sounds a bit more like Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four worrying about technology enabling totalitarianism.

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

Jude: This shows up in a couple different ways. This might actually be the most influential legacy of Dune as AI regulation becomes more and more of an issue.

Thomas: I don’t remember who it was, but I saw someone say once that this was just a convenience for Frank Herbert that allowed him to focus on human characters.

Jude: I doubt it. A key point of the Dune sequels is that, in Herbert’s idiosyncratic worldview, machine intelligences are creatures of stasis whereas biological human intelligence has the capacity to grow and evolve, albeit over very long time scales.

Thomas: That doesn’t really make any sense. It’s weird to say that humans have some essential thing that makes them qualitatively different from machines, but instead of a soul it turns out to be evolution. It was evolution that got people to think that maybe humans are just machines in the first place!

Jude: I don’t know. Frank Herbert said a lot of weird things. And in fairness to him, he was writing mostly before work with genetic algorithms showed that the biological process of evolution could be mirrored in computation to solve problems, work that eventually led to the AI we have today.

Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.

Jude: Jessica thinks this as she and Paul try to integrate with the Fremen. Very pithy. Maybe it’s a saying from Caladan.

Thomas: As usual I will ask: is this true? Swimming in strange water seems like it could be essential to success, thriving, growth, or dealing with change. But survival is kind of a low bar. Frank Herbert was concerned with stasis so you’d think he would appreciate how a lot of people just stick to safe, known waters and survive that way.

Jude: That kind of safety is quite privileged, isn’t it? Maybe if you live in a dangerous world, like the Fremen do, or even like Jessica herself in a world full of political intrigue, then you are forced into strange water whether you want to be or not.

Thomas: The book is very clear that the Fremen survive by hewing carefully to customs that they have created for surviving in the desert. Those waters aren’t strange to them. But I agree Jessica herself, despite her access to wealth and luxury, could be said to be always having to move in strange waters.

Jude: One other thing worth mentioning here, I think, is how many of these quotes have been internal monologues. Dune is full of characters thinking to themselves and trying to apply rules and sayings they’ve learned to their situations. Very stark contrast to Lord of the Rings where the aphorisms almost all emerge in dialogue. Perhaps Dune just much more concerned with the interiority of its characters?

Thomas: I think that’s a distortion from looking at popular quotes. We do see a lot of interior thoughts from Sam, for example, as he tries to adapt to the strange waters of leading Frodo through Mordor. But in Lord of the Rings, the hobbits don’t say much that people put on inspirational wall posters. And unlike in Dune, which is willing to hop into basically anyone’s head, Tolkien almost never gives us access to the interior thoughts of the “wise” characters like Gandalf and Elrond who produce most of the sayings.

Try looking into that place where you dare not look! You'll find me there, staring out at you!

Jude: Here’s some dialogue, then! Paul says this to the Reverend Mother at the climax of the book.

Thomas: I think we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel now. No one quotes this. Way too awkward. And the business about women having a place where they dare not look is, uh, weird. At best. And at worst—

Jude: Yeah, yeah, we’ll talk about gender in Dune in a different article.

Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what's incomplete and saying: ‘Now, it's complete because it's ended here.’

Jude: Here’s a Princess Irulan aphorism. I like this one a lot and hope you aren’t going to tell me it’s wordy or false.

Thomas: No, no notes on this one. Concise, feels meaningful. Not tremendously useful but I’ll allow it.

Jude: I think by the standards of these things it’s quite useful as an anti-perfectionism aphorism. Good job, Princess.

The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called “spannungsbogen” -- which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.

Jude: Princess Irulan again, this time trafficking in some ethnic stereotyping. The Fremen are all two marshmallow people. Just massive amounts of willpower.

Thomas: So many problems here. First, I don’t buy the notion that the Fremen would have more willpower than anyone else. Maybe they’d have even less? They have to focus on the here and now, both because they’re poor and because they’re in a really dangerous environment. This delayed gratification stuff is about sitting still in school, navigating long-term interest rates, and other challenges of modern life that our ancestors on the savannah didn’t have to deal with.

And second, when someone in Dune talks about “the ancients” they mean us. We’re the ancients. Which brings us to the question, do we really call this “spannungsbogen”? Is that really a thing? I’ve never heard of it.

Jude: Let’s find out.

In real-world German, 'Spannungsbogen' has only one meaning: A sequence (literally 'arc'='Bogen') of events in a movie, play or other work of art that creates suspense or tension (Spannung='tension, suspense'). The translations given [in Dune] are completely bogus. Granted, 'Spannungsbogen' might conceivably mean all that, but it doesn't.

Jude: That’s from the Wiktionary talk page for Spannungsbogen, which, naturally, appears to be full of English speakers insisting that Dune must be correct and incredulous German speakers saying no, it’s not.

Thomas: My guess is Frank Herbert read something that used this term as a one-off metaphor, misinterpreted it as common usage, and no one ever knew to correct him. Imagine how hard it would be to fact-check this before the Internet existed.

Jude: Or maybe it’s in character for Princess Irulan to be bad at German.

Thomas: Princess Irulan lives, like, twenty thousand years in our future. No offense to Germans, but she’s not going to know any German whatsoever. Or English for that matter.

Jude: True. The educated people of the future speak Chakobsa for some reason.

Thomas: If you read between the lines of the very charitable Wikipedia article, I’m afraid Chakobsa is probably not a real thing, or at least not more than a handful of words even as originally spoken.

Jude: That doesn’t preclude people in the future from explicitly inventing it, or repurposing a bunch of words from Arabic, Romani, and other langauges (as Herbert himself did) and convincing themselves it is Chakobsa.

Anyway, that’s all for today. We’ll be back soon with more, including looks at the role of women in Dune and Lord of the Rings, the somewhat problematic antagonists, and comparing the movie adaptations.