Michael Moorcock Quotes

Chaos delights in creation but swiftly becomes bored with what it creates for it seeks not order or justice or constancy but sensation, entertainment. Sometimes it suits it to create something which you and I would value or find pleasure in. But it is an accident.

My bargain with God included the undertaking that I should play no direct part, merely supervise mankind’s self-redemption. Like yourself, my agents are those whose independence of thought is already well-established.

Could you punish a heretic?"
"Madam, I do not know what a heretic really is. The word is made much of, these days. It seems to describe anyone you wish dead.

When he was dead I raised myself to my feet and I looked about me. Everything was still. A loneliness had come upon my soul.
There was darkness everywhere now but in the forest. And even here there were wisps of grey, as if evil crept in.
I lifted my head to the sky and I shook my fist. “Oh, I reject you. I reject your Heaven and I reject your Hell. Do as you wish with me, but know that your desires are petty and your ambitions have no meaning!”
I addressed no one. I addressed the universe. I addressed a void.

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.”

What the local politicians actually meant was that they hoped to claim the land in the name of the public and then make the usual profits privatizing it. There was a principle at stake. They had to ensure their friends and not outsiders got the benefit.

It is your capacity for love that makes you strong, Prince Corum."
"And my capacity for hate?"
"That directs your strength.

Thanks," said Elric, "and what did you give in the first place for the power to summon such a demon?"
"Why, my soul, of course. But it was an old one and not of much worth. Hell could be no worse than this existence.

I appreciate this quest for national identity," she said, "but it does seem that most traditions were dropped for the good reason that they were revoltingly cruel and stupid.

The fate of sentient life itself sometimes seems to me to be at stake. Yet do I fear? No, I think not. I place no special value upon sentience. I'd as cheerfully become a tree!"
"Who's to say they are not sentient?" Corum smiled as he set a pan upon the fire and began to lay strips of meat in the slowly boiling water.
"Well, then, a block of marble."
"Again, we do not know…" Corum began, but Jhary cut him short with a snort of impatience.
"I'll not play such childish games!"
"You misunderstand me. You have touched on a subject I have been considering only lately, you see. I, too, am beginning to realize that there is no special value to being, as it were, able to think. Indeed, one can see many disadvantages. The whole condition of mortals is created by their ability to analyze the universe and their inability to understand it.

It’s all a question of power and rarely a question of justice.

I knew that it was human nature which lay at the root of History and that no matter where I found myself I was bound to discover superficial similarities expressing and exemplifying that nature. It was human idealism and human impatience and human despair which continued to produce these terrible wars. Human virtues and vices, mixed and confused in individuals, created what we called “History”. Yet I could see no way in which the vicious circle of aspiration and desperation might ever be broken. We were all victims of our own imagination.

Her face was now a mask of moral outrage. “You talk of fashion while I speak of morality.”
It was true that Jerry had never been able to see much of a difference between the two.

I am for no master nor moral persuasion. I am for myself. What your yearning soul, madam, might mistake for loyalty to person or Purpose is merely a firm and, aye, principled determination to accept responsibility only for myself and my own actions.

“In Hell you become what you fear yourself to be. In Heaven you may become what you hope yourself to be,” said Lucifer.