Power Theme Analysis

This moment of supreme power contained failure. There can be only one answer, that completely accurate and total prediction can be lethal.

Dune was a world of paradox now—a world under siege, yet the center of power. To come under siege, he decided, was the inevitable fate of power.

I’ll yield up myself, he thought. I’ll rush out while I yet have the strength, fly through space like a bird might not find. It was a useless thought, and he knew it. The Jihad would follow his ghost.

His prescient power had tampered with the image of the universe held by all mankind. He had shaken the safe cosmos and replaced security with his Jihad. He had out-fought and out-thought and out-predicted the universe of men, but a certainty filled him that the universe still eluded him.

She should have understood long ago this similarity between the spice and the ghola. Melange was valuable, but it exacted a price—addiction. It added years to a life—decades for some—but it was still just another way to die.

“[Genghis Khan] didn’t kill them himself. […] He killed the way I kill, by sending out his legions. There’s another emperor I want you to note in passing—a Hitler. He killed more than six million. Pretty good for those days.”

Once…long ago, he’d thought of himself as an inventor of government. But the invention had fallen into old patterns. It was like some hideous contrivance with plastic memory. Shape it any way you wanted, but relax for a moment, and it snapped into the ancient forms. Forces at work beyond his reach in human breasts eluded and defied him.

Such powers predisposed one to vanity and pride. Power deluded those who used it. One tended to believe power could overcome any barrier…including one’s own ignorance.

The immensity of the universe outside the temple flooded his awareness. How could one man, one ritual, hope to knit such immensity into a garment fitted to all men?

“What’s law? Control? Law filters chaos and what drips through? Serenity? Law—our highest ideal and our basest nature. Don’t look too closely at the law. Do, and you’ll find the rationalized interpretations, the legal casuistry, the precedents of convenience. You’ll find the serenity, which is just another word for death.”

Government cannot be religious and self-assertive at the same time. Religious experience needs a spontaneity which laws inevitably suppress. And you cannot govern without laws. Your laws must inevitably replace morality, replace conscience, even replace the religion by which you think to govern.

Awareness turned over at the thought of all those stars above him—an infinite volume. A man must be half mad to imagine he could rule even a teardrop of that volume. He couldn’t begin to imagine the number of subjects his Imperium claimed.

The Fremen […] had said Muad’Dib would never die, that he had entered the world where all possible futures existed, […], wandering there endlessly even after his flesh had ceased to be.