Important Quotations Explained
1. “Religion
and law among our masses must be one and the same,” his father said.
“An act of disobedience must be a sin and require religious penalties.
This will have the dual benefit of bringing both greater obedience
and greater bravery. We must depend not so much on the bravery of individuals,
you see, as upon the bravery of a whole population.”
Kynes’s dead father says these words
in Book II, when Kynes is on the verge of death and hallucinating
in the desert of Arrakis. Kynes’s father states that religion’s
purpose is to steer a relatively ignorant impressionable population
toward a particular goal. Kynes’s father used religion to help steer
the Fremen, the indigent population of Arrakis, a people yearning
for a leader. Kynes and his father used religion to earn the loyalty
of the fierce Fremen with the purpose of transforming Arrakis from
a desert world into a green paradise. In addition, they seek to
use religion to end the crime that accompanies the illicit trade
of melange.
2. He
found that he no longer could hate the Bene Gesserit or the Emperor
or even the Harkonnens. They were all caught up in the need of their
race to renew its scattered inheritance, to cross and mingle and
infuse their bloodlines in a great new pooling of genes. And the
race knew only one sure way for this—the ancient way . . . jihad.
This passage from the end of Book I
occurs when Paul and his mother, Jessica, are hiding in a tent,
and she explains the forces behind what Paul calls his “terrible
purpose.” The Bene Gesserit, a group of women with superhuman powers,
create the Kwisatz Haderach, a person who provides the “shortening
of the way” toward reinvigorating humanity’s stagnant gene pool.
Paul realizes that the only way the human race knows how to diversify
its gene pool is through bloody, fanatical warfare. The creation
of a Kwisatz Haderach to help cross and mingle the bloodlines is
ironic. After tens of thousands of years of technological development
and human evolution, humans are still influenced first and foremost
by the most primary human instinct: sex drive.
3. “We
will treat your comrade with the same reverence we treat our own,”
the Fremen said. “This is the bond of water. We know the rites.
A man’s flesh is his own; the water belongs to the tribe.”
In the beginning of Book II, a member
of the Fremen speaks these words to Thufir Hawat, a Mentat who served
three generations of Atreides until he reluctantly joined the Harkonnens.
Hawat allows the Fremen to take the dead body of one of his soldiers
to be rendered down for water. For the Fremen, water is more important than
blood. Alliances are secured with the “bond of water” rather than
with blood oaths. Fremen remove the water from a body once it dies.
They keep the water for the tribe, or they store it in wells, where
it will eventually be used to alter the climate of Arrakis. Hawat,
by allowing his own men’s corpses to be tapped for precious water,
creates a strong bond between his men and the Fremen.
4. “A
duke’s son must know about poisons. . . . Here’s a new one for you:
the gom jabbar. It kills only animals.”
Reverend Mother Mohiam speaks these
words in the beginning of Book I. Her statement reveals the distinction
the novel makes between humans and animals. The Bene Gesserit believe
that animals react only by instinct, their base emotions, and drives.
They also believe that humans can use their self-awareness to combat instinct.
A Mentat, for example, uses only logic and removes all emotional
or irrational ideas from his decision-making process. Mother Mohiam
tests whether Paul is an animal or a human being by putting his
hand in a box that causes pain. Paul passes the test by resisting
the urge to pull his hand away from the pain. He rationalizes that
he will be poisoned if he moves his hand, and thus, he fights his
instinctual drive to run from the pain. This test is the first of many
that Paul must survive to become the Kwisatz Haderach.
5. The
drug had him again and he thought: So many times you’ve given me
comfort and forgetfulness. He felt anew the hyperillumination with
its high-relief imagery of time, sensed his future becoming memories—the
tender indignities of physical love, the sharing and communion of selves,
the softness and the violence.
This passage occurs in Book II after
Paul takes the drug melange, which significantly changes him. His
senses become more acute, and he is suddenly able to “see through
time.” Paul can now see infinite possibilities in future events,
and he realizes his actions will cause a jihad (holy war) in the
universe. Paul is also more sensitive to physical contact, particularly
when he is with his love, Chani. Paul’s consumption of the melange
is an important turning point in his development as a Kwisatz Haderach.
Paul becomes dependent on the melange to see into the future, and
the addictive substance in turn begins to shackle him. Paul needs
the melange to live and to fulfill his role as a Kwisatz Haderach.
The French word mélange means a mixture of diverse elements. Paul’s
role as a Kwisatz Haderach is to mix the elements of the human gene
pool—he needs melange to execute the mixture of gene pools that
will ultimately save his species.
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