Meggan

“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, Children of Dune

“In functioning democracies, the contradictions between avowed ideals and reality can be and often are called out, causing social and political change. That does not eliminate the built-in gap, but it has a way of making societies a little more democratic and a little less unequal, in spurts. Totalitarian ideology allows no such correction. Hannah Arendt maintained that any ideology can become totalitarian, but for that to happen it needs to be reduced to a single simple idea, which is then turned into a single simple idea from which the ostensible 'laws of history' are derived - and enforced through terror. What distinguishes a totalitarian ideology is its utterly insular quality. It purports to explain the entire world and everything in it. There is no gap between totalitarian ideology and reality because totalitarian ideology contains all of reality within itself.”
― Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

“[Hannah] Arendt wrote about the subjugation of public space - in effect the disappearance of public space, which, by depriving a person of boundaries and agency, rendered him profoundly lonely.”
― Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

“A good bureaucracy is the best tool of oppression ever invented.”
― Frank Herbert, The Jesus Incident