Paul Atreides Quotes & Sayings

I succumbed to the lure of the oracle, he thought.
And he sensed that succumbing to this lure might be to fix himself upon a single-track life. Could it be, he wondered, that the oracle didn't tell the future? Could it be that the oracle made the future? — Frank Herbert

Is that the name you wish, Muad'Dib?" Stilgar asked. "I am an Atreides," Paul whispered, and then louder: "It's not right that I give up entirely the name my father gave me. Could I be known among you as Paul-Muad'Dib?" "You are Paul-Muad'Dib," Stilgar said. And — Frank Herbert

The premise of Ezequiel Morsella's PRISM model7,8 is that consciousness originally evolved for the delightfully mundane purpose of mediating conflicting motor commands to the skeletal muscles. (I have to point out that exactly the same sort of conflict - the impulse to withdraw one's hand from a painful stimulus, versus the knowledge that you'll die if you act on that impulse - was exactly how the Bene Gesserit assessed whether Paul Atreides qualified as "Human" during their gom jabbar test in Frank Herbert's Dune.) — Peter Watts

Dune Messiah, Frank Herbert's first sequel to Dune, was published in 1969. In that book, he flipped over what he called the "myth of the hero" and showed the dark side of Paul Atreides. Some readers didn't understand it. Why would the author do that to his great hero? In interviews, Dad spent years afterward explaining why, and his reasons were sound. He believed that charismatic leaders could be dangerous because they could lead their followers off the edge of a cliff. — Frank Herbert