Michael Moorcock Quotes

Destiny’s Champion,
Fate’s fool.
Eternity’s Soldier,
Time’s Tool.

Thus woman trusts in man down all the years and so, as always, is betrayed.

I watched him while he moved about in the nearby spinney below, bending and straightening, shaking snow from the sticks he found, and for some reason was reminded of the parable of Abraham and his son. Why should one serve a God who demanded such insane loyalty, who demanded that one deny the very humanity He was said to have created?

This is the stuff which some Nazis wished to put into our churches," whispered von Bek. "Pagan objects of worship which they claim are the symbols of a true German religion. They are almost as anti-Christian as they are anti-Semitic. It is as if they hate every system of thought which in any way questions their own mish-mash of pseudo-philosophy and mystical claptrap!" He stared at the altar in disgust. "They are the worst kind of nihilists. They cannot even see that they destroy everything and create nothing. Their invention is as empty as any inventions of Chaos I have seen. It has no true history, no concrete substance, no depth, no quality of intellect. It is merely a negation, a brutal denial of all Germany's virtues.

The sentient may perceive and love the universe, but the universe cannot perceive and love the sentient.

You’re as worthless as one of that decrepit mob. Lucifer has rejected you. Now mankind rejects you. Have the good taste, Sir, to accept a fact!

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.

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.

Are you trying to talk peace terms?"
"I've given that up," said Makhno. "It doesn't appear to work. You mention peace and everyone tries to shoot you or jail you.

Machine-devoured, all his hours were given o’er to that insidious circuitry, and old grew he, unnoticing, in the service of his engines.

There is, in my view, a level at which the hero can become faintly ridiculous, often because he never fundamentally questions the rules. For instance, John Wayne’s characters were always basically in favor of old-fashioned paternalism, no matter how much they pretended to be rugged individualists.
Later, I became fascinated by the kind of book examining the myths which make such heroes attractive (Lord Jim, for instance) and came to understand that there is a level at which the heroic ideal can be used as a mere manipulative propaganda designed for instance to make young women sacrifice their futures in unjust marriages or young men sacrifice their lives in unjust wars.

But now the Mob’s passing whim had become the only law, as Robespierre himself would soon discover. I felt cruelly betrayed: by the Revolution, by men I had embraced as brothers, by Circumstance, and, as always, by God.

Your yearning, Pepin Hunchback, is not for the past as it was," she was saying softly. "It is for a world that never existed—a Paradise, a Golden Age. Men have always spoken of such a time in history—but such an idyllic world is a yearning for childhood, not the past, for lost innocence. It is childhood we wish to return to.

Why hadn't the dead human race realized this? It was only necessary to exist, not to be trying constantly to prove you existed when the fact was plain.
Plain to him, he realized, because he had climbed a mountain. This knowledge was his reward. He had not received any ability to think with greater clarity, or a vision to reveal the secret of the universe, or an experience of ecstasy. He had been given, by himself, by his own action, insensate peace, the infinite tranquility of existing.

Are the gods mad or are they so subtle we cannot fathom the workings of their minds?