Quotessence
Home / Books / God Emperor of Dune

God Emperor of Dune

Book by Frank Herbert · 20 quotes · Ifs, Society, Thinking

Filter quotes by topic

AllIfsSocietyThinkingTimeBeliefDangerDenyKnowsLyingPeopleViolenceWarAmbiguityArmyAvailableBelieveCautionChangeChaosConservatism

God Emperor of Dune Quotes

“Drug knowledge originated mostly with males because they tend to be more venturesome-an outgrowth of male aggression. You've read your Orange Catholic Bible, thus you know the story of Eve and the apple. Here's an interesting fact about that story: Eve was not the first to pluck and sample the apple. Adam was first and he learned by this to put the blame on Eve.”

ReligionSinViolenceAdventureBlameAggressionDrugs
Book:God Emperor of Dune
Create image

“It becomes dramatically instructive under overcrowded conditions. The ghetto is lethal. Psychic stresses of overcrowding create pressures which will erupt. The city is an attempt to manage these forces. The social forms by which cities make the attempt are worth study. Remember that there exists a certain malevolence about the formation of any social order. It is the struggle for existence by an artificial entity. Despotism and slavery hover at the edges. Many injuries occur and, thus, the need for laws. The law develops its own power structure, creating more wounds and new injustices. Such trauma can be healed by cooperation, not by confrontation. The summons to cooperate identifies the healer.”

HealingSocietyInjusticeSocialismCooperation
Book:God Emperor of Dune
Create image

“What am I eliminating? The bourgeois infatuation with peaceful conservation of the past. This is a binding force, a thing which holds humankind into one vulnerable unit in spite of illusionary separations across parsecs of space. If I can find the scattered bits, others can find them. When you are together, you can share a common catastrophe. You can be exterminated together. Thus, I demonstrate the terrible danger of a gliding, passionless mediocrity, a movement without ambitions or aims. I show you that entire civilizations can do this thing. I give you eons of life which slips gently toward death without fuss or stirring, without even asking 'Why?' I show you the false happiness and the shadow-catastrophe called Leto, the God Emperor. Now, will you learn the real happiness?”

ProgressConservatismBourgeois Society
Book:God Emperor of Dune
Create image

“Do you know what guerrillas often say? They claim that their rebellions are invulnerable to economic warfare because they have no economy, that they are parasitic on those they would overthrow. The fools merely fail to access the coin in which they must inevitably pay. The pattern is inexorable in its degenerative failures. You see it repeated in the systems of slavery, of welfare states, of caste-ridden religions, of socializing bureaucracies -- in any system in which creates and maintains dependencies. Too long a parasite and you cannot exist without a host.”

SlaveryGuerrilla WarfareSocialismeEconomic WarfareWelfare States
Book:God Emperor of Dune
Create image