Fritz Leiber Quotes

Fafhrd retorted, a little hotly, “Killing in fight isn’t murder.”
Again the Mouser shrugged. “Killing is murder, no matter what nice names you give. Just as eating is devouring, and drinking guzzling.”

For what is life but greed in action?

And I, well, in the month I’ve been here I’ve learned that the only way to survive in civilization is to abide by its unwritten rules—far more important than its laws chiseled in stone—and break them only at peril, in deepest secrecy, and taking all precautions.

Aye, we played at being mice, forgetting cats are real.

Women are horrible. I mean, quite as horrible as men. Oh, is there anyone in the wide world that has aught but ice water in his or her veins?

I know, I know, the folk here are narrow-visioned, custom-bound. But matched with the twisted minds of civilization, they’re straight as pines.

Afterward loses too many battles to Too Late.

Barbarism can match civilization’s every stench. Not one move in our frostbit lives but is strictured by a mad god’s laws, which we call customs, and by black-handed irrationalities from which there is no escape.

Sooner give a cobra a kiss, than a secret to a woman.

Then he was running not so much away from the cold and its crippling, supernatural horrors, as toward civilization, which was once again a bright emblem in his brain, an answer to all small-mindedness.

The Seven Subjects of Sensational Journalism: crime, scandal, speculative science, insanity, superstitions such as numerology, monsters, and millionaires.

There is an inescapable imperative about certain industrial developments. If there is not a safe road of advance, then a dangerous one will invariably be taken.

Beside me, traffic growled and snarled, rising at times to a machine-gun rata-tat-tat, while pedestrians were scuttling about with that desperate ratlike urgency characteristic of all big American cities, but which reaches its ultimate in New York.

Two things will last to the end of time, at least for the tribes of Western Man, no matter how far his spaceships rove. They are sorcery and romantic love, which come to much the same thing in the end.

Work and pray,
Live on hay.
You’ll get pie
In the sky
When you die—
It’s a lie!