"Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else. Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us."
-Rorschach.
British comic book author (born 1953)
Alan Moore (born 18 November 1953) is a British writer, most famous for his influential work in comic-books and graphic novels.
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Pen Names:
Kurt Vile
Native Name:
Alan Oswald Moore
Alternative Names:
Curt Vile
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Jill de Ray
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Translucia Baboon
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The Original Writer
From Wikidata (CC0)
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Dan: We're looking at World War Three within the WEEK! I mean, what do we DO? The stakes are so high and humanity is so close to the edge...
Rorschach: Some of us have always lived on edge, Daniel. It is possible to survive there if you observe rules: Just hang on by fingernails... and never look down.
A god is the idea of a god. The idea of a god is a god. The idea of Glycon is Glycon, if I can enhance that idea with an anaconda and a speaking tube, fair enough. I am unlikely to start believing that this glove puppet created the universe. It’s a fiction, all gods are fiction. It’s just that I happen to think that fiction’s real. Or that it has its own reality, that is just as valid as ours. I happen to believe that most of the important things in the material world start out as fiction. That everything around us was once fiction – before there was the table there was the idea of a table, and the idea of a table before tables was fiction. This is the most important world, the world of fictional things. That’s the world where all this starts.
Things tend to organise themselves. If there is any message from contemporary science, it is surely that. I am very fond of the anarchist proverb regarding laws – good people have no need for them, bad people pay no attention to them, what are they there for, other than as a symbol of power – ‘We can say this is law’. I could say I rule the universe, it depends on whether anyone believes me or not. To some degree, I don’t think the authorities care whether the law is observed or not, as long as it is there, and everyone accepts the idea of law. As long as they buy into the idea of law.
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The whole program of evolution seems to be to diversify, because in diversity there is strength. And if you apply that on a social level, then you get something like anarchy. Everybody is recognized as having their own abilities, their own particular agendas, and everybody has their own need to work cooperatively with other people. So it’s conceivable that the same kind of circumstances that obtain in a small human grouping, like a family or like a collection of friends, could be made to obtain in a wider human grouping like a civilization.