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.

Violence creates nothing but violence, no matter what we call it and what the excuse. And so it goes, down all the centuries.

Intelligence and power were never the same thing," murmurs the Rose, departing from her own train of thought for a moment. "Frequently a lust for power is nothing more than an impulse of the stupidly baffled who cannot understand why they have been treated so badly by Dame Fortune. Who can blame those brutes, sometimes? They are outraged by random Nature. Perhaps the gods feel the same? Perhaps they make us endure such awful trials because they know we are actually superior to them? Perhaps they have become senile and forget the point of their old truces?"
"You speak truth in one area, madam," said Elric. "Nature distributes power with about the same lack of discrimination as she distributes intelligence or beauty or wealth, indeed!"
"Which is why mankind," says Wheldrake, revealing a little of his own background, "has a duty to correct such mistakes of justice that Nature makes.

If he wished he could resurrect the Dragon Isle’s former might and rule both his own land and the Young Kingdoms as an invulnerable tyrant. But his reading has also taught him to question the uses to which power is put, to question his motives, to question whether his own power should be used at all, in any cause. His reading has led him to this “morality”, which, still, he barely understands.

My instinct shouted “Conspiracy” but my head reasoned “Coincidence”.

I'll be seeing you," said Jerry.
Koutrouboussis chuckled to himself. "At this rate you'll be raising me, too.

Be silent!" That is the perpetual admonition of Tyranny. Tyranny bellows 'Be silent!' even to the screams of its victims, the pathetic moans and groanings and supplications of its trampled millions.

Everything means nothing—that is the only truth.

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

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.

Like so many others he seemed to equate self-pity with artistic inspiration. In an earlier age he might have discovered his public and become quite rich (self-pity passing for passion in the popular understanding).

We’ll build a world where Order shall prevail. A few more deaths are inconsequential, surely, if they guarantee us eternal life and absolute fulfillment?

At that moment I railed against a God who could condemn such an innocent soul to Purgatory. What had Sedenko done that was not the result of his upbringing or his religion, which encouraged him to kill in the name of Christ? It came to me that perhaps God had become senile, that He had lost His memory and no longer remembered the purpose of placing Man on Earth. He had become petulant, He had become whimsical. He retained His power over us, but could no longer be appealed to. And where was His Son, who had been sent to redeem us? Was God’s Plan not so much mysterious as impossible for us to accept: because it was a malevolent one?

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

I now know that legends in themselves have no power. The power comes from the uses that the living make of the legend. The legends merely represent an ideal.