Dune Mentat Quotes

Since every individual is accountable ultimately to the self, the formation of that self demands our utmost care and attention.

Just repeating a statement often and with great vehemence does not make it a fact, and no amount of repetition can make a rational person believe it.

Are you already training my replacement? Piter demanded. "Replace you? Why, Piter, where could I find another Mentat with your cunning and venom?" "The same place you found me, Baron." "Perhaps I should at that," the Baron mused. "You do seem a bit unstable lately. And the spice you eat!" "Are my pleasures too expensive, Baron? Do you object to them?" "My dear Piter, your pleasures are what tie you to me. How could I object to that?

Every hammer has the innate capacity to strike a nail. Every human mind has the innate capacity for greatness. But not every hammer is properly used, nor is every human mind.

Piter spoke to Jessica. "I'd thought of binding you by a threat held over your son, but I begin to see that would not have worked. I let emotion cloud reason. Bad policy for a Mentat.

Ah, Hah! But you see, Baron, I know as a Mentat when you will send the executioner. You will hold back just so long as I am useful. To move sooner would be wasteful and I'm yet of much use. I know what it is you learned from that lovely Dune planet - waste not? True, Baron? -Piter De Vries

Absolute rules are for unthinking people. Sheep require fences—humans do not.

So I quoted the First Law of Mentat at her: ‘A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

As a human being, I was born on the brink of personal destruction, and I have spent my life dancing along the edge of that cliff.

She said the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience. So I quoted the First Law of Mentat at her: ‘A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

I’ll never be a Mentat,” he said. “I’m something else…a freak.

Anyone who searches for the meaning of life is on a fool’s journey. Human life has no redeeming purpose or value. —the cymek GENERAL AGAMEMNON, A Time for Titans

Thinking you knew something was a sure way to blind yourself. It was not growing up that slowly applied brakes to learning (Mentats were taught) but an accumulation of “things I know.” New

Then she said a good ruler has to learn his world’s language, that it’s different for every world. And I thought she meant they didn’t speak Galach on Arrakis, but she said that wasn’t it at all. She said she meant the language of the rocks and growing things, the language you don’t hear just with your ears. And I said that’s what Dr. Yueh calls the Mystery of Life.” Hawat chuckled. “How’d that sit with her?” “I think she got mad. She said the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience. So I quoted the First Law of Mentat at her: 'A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

Human imagination is a powerful thing. It can be a sanctuary from difficult times, a catalyst to change society, or the impetus to create marvelous works of art. On the other hand, an overabundance of imagination can inspire paranoia that impairs one’s ability to interact with reality. —Suk School Manual, Psychological Studies

Special knowledge can be a terrible disadvantage if it leads you too far along a path that you cannot explain anymore. —Mentat Admonition

in preservation canisters, so they could be installed into any cymek walker. Now

Successful people sort through priorities and act upon them, while the unsuccessful see only a fog of chaos. —DIRECTEUR JOSEF VENPORT, instruction to business trainees

Crossing the line from friend to enemy takes only a small step. The opposite journey, however, is far more difficult. —Zensunni wisdom of the desert

Inflexible convictions are powerful things. But are they a suit of armor or a prison cell? A weapon or a weakness? —EMPEROR JULES CORRINO, strategic briefing on unrest in the former Unallied Planets

Do you not have tribes? Rivalries?" "Of course," said Taref. "All of us do. I am the son of a Naib." "The third son of a Naib." Lillis said. "Because of my two older brothers, I will never rule the tribe.

Mentats cultivated naivete. Thinking you knew something was a sure way to blind yourself. It was not growing up that slowly applied brakes to learning (Mentats were taught) but an accumulation of “things I know.

Pain is a function of nerves, Idaho reminded himself. Pain comes as light comes to the eyes. Effort comes from the muscles, not from nerves. It was an old mentat drill and he completed it in the space of one breath,

We can never atone for all the harm we cause in our lifetimes. We each make decisions based on personal priorities. In the process, people are invariably shunted aside. Someone suffers. —teaching of the new Philosophical Academy

He felt that his mentat faculties had been dulled, let out a long, shuddering breath. A psychic shadow passed over him. In the emotional darkness of it, he felt himself waiting for some absolute sound—the snap of a branch in a jungle.

environment where students could develop their mental skills through hours of uninterrupted meditation. Gilbertus had chosen this inhospitable area with a specific purpose in mind. He believed the danger and isolation would help focus the

Order generally was a product of human activity. Chaos existed as raw material from which to create order. That was the Mentat approach, giving no unalterable truths but a remarkable lever for decision-making: orderly assemblage of data in a non-discrete system.

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind,’” Paul quoted. “Right out of the Butlerian Jihad and the Orange Catholic Bible,” she said. “But what the O.C. Bible should’ve said is: ‘Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind.’ Have you studied the Mentat in your service?

• Frank Herbert is a philosopher. • He’s a philosopher, not just in the way that everyone can have a “philosophy” of something or other, but an honest-togoodness philosopher, and he uses novels to construct and communicate his philosophy. • Herbert’s Dune saga is a work of philosophy that interacts primarily with the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and the way in which Nietzsche’s ideas about humanity could be understood in light of the horrors of the twentith century.

Above all else, the mentat must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The mentat-generalist, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in his universe. He must remain capable of saying: “There’s no real mystery about this at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we’ll correct that when we come to it.” The mentat-generalist must understand that anything which we can identify as our universe is merely part of larger phenomena. But the expert looks backward; he looks into the narrow standards of his own specialty. The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles, knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop.

She sighed. “Thufir, I want you to examine your own emotional involvement in this. The natural human’s an animal without logic. Your projections of logic onto all affairs is unnatural, but suffered to continue for its usefulness. You’re the embodiment of logic—a Mentat. Yet, your problem solutions are concepts that, in a very real sense, are projected outside yourself, there to be studied and rolled around, examined from all sides.” “You think now to teach me my trade?” he asked, and he did not try to hide the disdain in his voice. “Anything outside yourself, this you can see and apply your logic to it,” she said. “But it’s a human trait that when we encounter personal problems, those things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan. We tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual, deep-seated thing that’s really chewing on us.

Above all else, the mentat must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The mentat-generalist, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in his universe. He must remain capable of saying: “There’s no real mystery about this at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we’ll correct that when we come to it.” The mentat-generalist must understand that anything which we can identify as our universe is merely part of larger phenomena. But the expert looks backward; he looks into the narrow standards of his own specialty. The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles, knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop. It is to the characteristics of change itself that the mentat-generalist must look. There can be no permanent catalogue of such change, no handbook or manual. You must look at it with as few preconceptions as possible, asking yourself: “Now what is this thing doing?” —THE MENTAT HANDBOOK

In 1690 in his An Essay on Human Understanding, John Locke explores what it is for a person to be self-same, that is to say, be one person and remain that same person over the course of time. Sameness of person is marked out by unity of consciousness. “Self is that conscious thinking thing,” Locke writes, “which is sensible, or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for it self as far as that consciousness extends.” So, if an individual can, within their consciousness of the present, repeat the experience of a past action with the same consciousness they had of it originally, then the individual is the self-same person. In other words, can they remember it?

Without their charismatic demagogue to lead them, the chattering monkeys would disperse and find some other idiotic superstition to believe in.

They’re Duncan’s words and Duncan was speaking as a mentat. ‘In doing good, avoid notoriety; in doing evil, avoid self-awareness.

In response to the strict Butlerian taboo against machines that perform mental functions, a number of schools developed enhanced human beings to subsume most of the functions formerly performed by computers. Some of the key schools arising out of the Jihad include the Bene Gesserit with their intense mental and physical training, the Spacing Guild with the prescient ability to find a safe path through foldspace, and the Mentats, whose computerlike minds are capable of extraordinary acts of reasoning.

The Spacing Guild needed vast amounts of melange to fill the enclosed chambers of their mutated Navigators. He himself, and all the upper classes in the Empire, needed daily (and increasing) doses of melange to maintain their vitality and to extend their lives. The Bene Gesserit Sisterhood needed it in their training to create more Reverend Mothers. Mentats needed it for mental focus.

Facts are fragile. A Mentat can get tangled in them. Too much reliable data. It’s like diplomacy. You need a few good lies to get at your projections.

Thoughts with fuzzy edges feathered away into darkness—unknown. Infinite systems! A mentat could not function without realizing he worked in infinite systems. Fixed knowledge could not surround the infinite. Everywhere could not be brought into finite perspective. Instead, he must become the infinite—momentarily.

It was Rhajia, the movement of Infinity as expressed by Life, the latent cup of total immersion in mentat awareness which lay in wait for every mentat. It threw his awareness onto the universe like a net, falling, defining the shapes within it.

With accumulated skills of many lifetimes, he looked on his surrounding through a screen of sophistication and naivete. Mentats culvitated naivete. Thinking you knew something was a sure way to blind yourself. It was not growing up that slowly applied brakes to learning but an accumulation of “things I know.

Mentats share the fallibilities of those who use them,” she said. “The human mind, as is the case with the mind of any animal, is a resonator. It responds to resonances in the environment. The mentat has learned to extend his awareness across many parallel loops of causality and to proceed along those loops for long chains of consequences

Above all else, the mentat must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nitpicking, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The mentat-generalist, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in his universe. He must remain capable of saying: “There’s no real mystery about this at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we’ll correct that when we come to it.” The mentat-generalist must understand that anything which we can identify as our universe is merely part of larger phenomena. But the expert looks backward; he looks for living principles, knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop. It is to the characteristics of change itself that the mentat-generalist must look. There can be no permanent catalogue of such change, no handbook or manual. You must look at it with as few preconceptions as possible, asking yourself: “Now what is this thing doing?” —The Mentat Handbook

She said the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience. So I quoted the First Law of Mentat at her: ‘A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with

People often surprise me, but not usually in a good way.

It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The mentat-generalist, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in his universe. He must remain capable of saying: “There’s no real mystery about this at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we’ll correct that when we come to it.

So I quoted the First Law of Mentat at her: ‘A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.’ That seemed to satisfy her.

Many elements of the Imperium believe they hold the ultimate power: the Spacing Guild with their monopoly on interstellar travel, CHOAM with its economic stranglehold, the Bene Gesserit with their secrets, the Mentats with their control of mental processes, House Corrino with their throne, the Great and Minor Houses of the Landsraad with their extensive holdings. Woe to us on the day that one of those factions decides to prove the point.

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.” “‘Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind,’” Paul quoted. “Right out of the Butlerian Jihad and the Orange Catholic Bible,” she said. “But what the O.C. Bible should’ve said is: ‘Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind.’ Have you studied the Mentat in your service?” “I’ve studied with Thufir Hawat.” “The Great Revolt took away a crutch,” she said. “It forced human minds to develop. Schools were started to train human talents.” “Bene Gesserit schools?” She nodded. “We have two chief survivors of those ancient schools: the Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild. The Guild, so we think, emphasizes almost pure mathematics. Bene Gesserit performs another function.” “Politics,” he said. “Kull wahad!” the old woman said. She sent a hard glance at Jessica. “I’ve not told him, Your Reverence,” Jessica said. The Reverend Mother returned her attention to Paul. “You did that on remarkably few clues,” she said. “Politics indeed. The original Bene Gesserit school was directed by those who saw the need of a thread of continuity in human affairs. They saw there could be no such continuity without separating human stock from animal stock—for breeding purposes.

At last, after our long journey, we have reached the beginning. -Mentat Conundrum

Thinking you knew something was a sure way to blind yourself. It was not growing up that slowly applied brakes to learning (Mentats were taught) but an accumulation of “things I know.

Não há a menor distinção entre deuses e homens: as duas coisas se misturam sem cerimônia.

O fenômeno da presciência é mal compreendido até mesmo por seus iniciados.

A razão é a primeira vítima das emoções fortes.

Quem governa assume uma responsabilidade irrevogável pelos governados. Você é um fazendeiro. Isso exige, em certo momentos, um ato de amor altruísta que talvez pareça apenas divertido para aqueles a quem você governa.

Why look for meaning where there is none? Would you follow a path you know leads nowhere? —Query of the Mentat School

The ego is only a bit of consciousness swimming upon the ocean of dark things. We are an enigma unto ourselves. —The Mentat Handbook

The unexpected is not always a surprise. —Mentat observation

In desperation we may agree to pay any price. Only later do we learn the true cost. —MENTAT PEARTEN, new Lampadas school archives

How many people can be told a secret, before it is no longer considered a secret? —Mentat conundrum (to which there is more than one correct answer)

In any major conflict, each side fights for its own cause—a belief system they consider worth dying for. Alas, there is not an objective, omnipotent arbiter who can simply decide the merits of each issue and put them to rest without bloodshed, thereby rendering armed conflict obsolete. —GILBERTUS ALBANS, Conversations with Erasmus

Every memory has a trigger. —Mentat observation

Just repeating a statement often and with great vehemence does not make it a fact, and no amount of repetition can make a rational person believe it. —DRAIGO ROGET, report to Venport Holdings, “Analysis of Fanatical Patterns

Norma said with great portent, “Ignorance is a powerful armor against the truth.

threat works only if the recipient believes you are willing to carry through with it. —REVEREND MOTHER RAQUELLA BERTO-ANIRUL

First Law of Mentat at her: ‘A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

Practice can take a student only so far. To truly advance, he must experience the real thing. —GILBERTUS ALBANS, Mentat manual

Thufir, I want you to examine your own emotional involvement in this. The natural human’s an animal without logic. Your projections of logic onto all affairs is unnatural, but suffered to continue for its usefulness. You’re the embodiment of logic—a Mentat. Yet, your problem solutions are concepts that, in a very real sense, are projected outside yourself, there to be studied and rolled around, examined from all sides.

Every hammer has the innate capacity to strike a nail. Every human mind has the innate capacity for greatness. But not every hammer is properly used, nor is every human mind. —DRAIGO ROGET, Mentat debriefing for Venport Holdings

Every person can be manipulated—and all of us are, in one manner or another. —wisdom of the Cogitors

We are human not because of our physical form, but because of our underlying nature. Even when fitted with a machine body, a man may have a heart and soul … but not always. People made of flesh can be monsters, too. —PTOLEMY, Laboratory Sketches

I think she got mad. She said the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience. So I quoted the First Law of Mentat at her: ‘A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.’ That seemed to satisfy her.

Many years ago, the robot had developed a special term in honor of Gilbertus’s burgeoning mental processes, his remarkable memory-organizational ability and capacity for logical thinking. “I am your mentor,” the robot had said. “You are my mentee. I am instructing you in mentation. Therefore, I will call you by a nickname I have derived from these terms. I will use the name whenever I am especially pleased with your performance. I hope you consider it a term of endearment.” Gilbertus had grinned at his master’s praise. “A term of endearment? What is it, Father?” “I will call you my Mentat.” And the name had stuck.

Zensunni training permitted him to overcome the shock of events. The mentat accomplishment formed a counterbalance. He put off all fear, standing above the source. His entire consciousness looked outward from a position of infinite wonder: he had been dead; he was alive.

Then she said a good ruler has to learn his world’s language, that it’s different for every world. And I thought she meant they didn’t speak Galach on Arrakis, but she said that wasn’t it at all. She said she meant the language of the rocks and growing things, the language you don’t hear just with your ears. And I said that’s what Dr. Yueh calls the Mystery of Life.” Hawat chuckled. “How’d that sit with her?” “I think she got mad. She said the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience. So I quoted the First Law of Mentat at her: ‘A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.’ That seemed to satisfy her.

Mentat, solve thyself, he thought.

Do you not have tribes? Rivalries?" "Of course," said Taref. "All of us do. I am the son of a Naib." "The third son of a Naib." Lillis said. "Because of my two older brothers, I will never rule the tribe.