Michael Moorcock Quotes

Women are always underestimated by men," said Alisaard, a note of satisfaction in her voice, "and this enables them sometimes to gather far more power to themselves than the men suspect.

One may mirror the truth or seek to assuage it," said Elric. "Sometimes one can even try to change it..."
Wheldrake took a sudden pull on his bumper. "I was not raised to a world, sir, where truth was malleable and reality a question of what you made it. It is hard for me to hear such notions. Indeed, sir, I will admit to you that it alarms me. Not that I fail to appreciate the wonder of it, sir, or the optimism which you are, in your own way, expressing. It is just that I was born to trust and celebrate certain senses and accept that a great unchanging beauty was the order of the universe, a set of natural laws which, as it were, coincided in subtle ways with a mighty machine—intricate and complex but ultimately rational. This Nature, sir, was what I celebrated and worshipped, as other might celebrate and worship a Deity. What you suggest, sir, seems to me retrogressive. These, surely, are closer to the discredited notions of alchemy?

I am so weary of gods and their struggles," he murmured as he mounted his golden mare.
Moonglum stared out into the desert.
"But when will the gods themselves weary of it, I wonder?" he said. "If they did, it would be a happy day for Man. Perhaps all our struggling, our suffering, our conflicts are merely to relieve the boredom of the Lords of the Higher Worlds. Perhaps that is why when they created us they made us imperfect.

It has often been noted that gods could not exist without mortals and mortals could not exist without gods."
"Yet gods, it appears," said Corum, "can affect our destinies."
"And we can affect theirs, can we not?

There's more to life than drugs and sex, Mr. Cornelius."
"There's more than life to drugs and sex. It's better than nothing.

Listening to the conversation, his faith in the stupidity of human nature was fully restored.

For this was the other thing that Elric knew; that to compromise with Tyranny is always to be destroyed by it. The sanest and most logical choice lay always in resistance.

It's never 'should' with engineers, my old friend, but 'how'? Have you not learned that much?

I am dead," said Corum, "and would be grateful if you would allow me to be dead in peace.

Time is at once an agony of the Present, a long torment of the Past and the terrible prospect of countless Futures. Time is also a complex of subtly intersecting realities, of unguessable consequences and undiscoverable causes, of profound tensions and dependencies.

How true it is when they say there is nothing which makes a man more furious than the discovery that he has deceived himself!

He gasped as he stepped forward to peer at them, observing living faces, eyes which were undying, lips frozen in expressions of terror, of anguish, of misery. They were like so many flies in amber.
“That’s the unchanging past, Prince Elric,” said Oone. “That’s the fate of those who seek to reclaim their lost beliefs without first experiencing the search for new ones.”

Once rich, moreover, I should again travel easily about Europe, for while in the public eye a poor radical is dangerous rogue, a rich radical is merely an eccentric gentleman!

That evening I lit many candles and sat in the library wearing fresh linen and drinking good wine while I read a treatise on astronomy by a student of Kepler’s and reflected on my increasing disagreement with Luther, who had judged reason to be the chief enemy of Faith, of the purity of his beliefs. He had considered reason a harlot, willing to turn to anyone’s needs, but this merely displayed his own suspicion of logic. I have come to believe him the madman Catholics described him as. Most mad people see logic as a threat to the dream in which they would rather live, a threat to their attempts to make the dream reality (usually through force, through threat, through manipulation and through bloodshed). It is why men of reason are so often the first to be killed or exiled by tyrants.

Better wicked Lucifer for a master, thought I, than a pious Tyrant!