Michael Moorcock Quotes

Destiny was apparently a word describing an individual’s desperate need for certainty.

If the people at the top think that reaching for a gun will solve the problem, why shouldn’t the people at the bottom think the same?

“I have heard it said it is often safer to dwell in the lion’s lair than outside it,” Oladahn said.
“Safer still to live in a land where there are no lions,” Count Brass retorted.

“In my own world, sir, sad to say, human prejudice is matched only by human folly. Not a soul claims to be prejudiced, of course, as there are few who would describe themselves as fools...”
Elric, chewing on a piece of barely palatable salt beef, remarked that this seemed a quality of a good deal of society, throughout the multiverse.

The man called himself a wizard, but Corum would have called him a philosopher, someone who enjoyed exploring and discovering the secrets of nature.

You desire power only for that most selfish of all ends, and therefore you know no boundaries in the seeking and the gaining of it.

I looked down at her shriveled corpse. It lay across that of her brother. One had represented the evil of the world, the other the good. Yet both had been defeated by pride, by ambition, by a promise of immortality.

It had been some years since I had lost my Faith, save in my own capacity to survive a world at War, but evidently in the back of my mind there had always been some sense that through God one might find salvation. Now, as I journeyed in quest of the Holy Grail (or something identified as the Holy Grail), I not only questioned the possibility that salvation existed; I questioned whether God’s salvation was worth the earning. Again I began to see the struggle between God and Lucifer as nothing more than a squabble between petty princelings over who should possess power in a tiny, unimportant territory. The fate of the tenants of that territory did not much seem to matter to them; and even the reward of those tenants’ loyalty seemed thin enough to me.

The barbarians don’t come from outside the walls any more, do they?

Petersburg socialism seems cold to the likes of our Cossacks, who would rather worship personalities than embrace ideas."
I shared his irony. "You make them sound like Americans.

The Dead God’s Book and the Golden Barge are one and the same. They have no real existence, save in the wishful imagination of mankind. There is, the story says, no Holy Grail which will transform a man overnight from bewildered ignorance to complete knowledge—the answer already is within him, if he cares to train himself to find it. A rather overemphasised fact, throughout history, but one generally ignored all the same.

Often people fight hardest of all to preserve a delusion. And they will frequently persecute those who challenge that delusion.

Warlocks and witches debate to determine how to make their broomsticks fly again. But how shall they ever come together in strength? Even if your ideas had any truth, they’re so frequently, by their very character, at odds. Each claims to hold the key to the only wisdom. That’s where natural philosophers, who do not impose what they need to believe (or at least not so readily!) upon the world, but analyze what they see, have the strong advantage.

There is less danger, gentlemen, in living according to a set of high moral principles than most politicians believe.

I felt sorry for him at that moment. He only wanted what every man wanted—freedom from fear, a chance to raise children with a reasonable certainty that they would be allowed to do the same, a chance to look forward to the future without the knowledge that any plans made might be wrecked forever by some sudden act of violence.