Michael Moorcock Quotes

Yesterday’s underdog is tomorrow’s tyrant.

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

As Barrington Bayley had pointed out in his book Structural Dynamism, man was not an intelligent animal. He was an animal with intelligence that he could apply to some, not all, of his activities.

I realized I was fulfilling mankind’s greatest dream—to fly like a bird, as naturally and as joyously as if the air were our familiar habitat.

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.

The soldier shook his head, waxing philosophical. “It’s a madness, sir. We’ve all got it. It could go on until the last human being crawls away from the body of the chap he’s just bashed to bits with a stone. That’s what war is, sir—madness. You don’t think about what you’re doing. You forget, don’t you—you just go on killing and killing.”

Everything dies eventually—but that shouldn’t stop us enjoying life while it is there to be enjoyed.

Unlike so many politicians or military leaders they made no attempt to justify their mistakes, to cling to power. For them power held enormous responsibility and was merely invested in them temporarily.

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?

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

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.

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.

Ultimately, Chaos brings a more profound stagnation than anything it despises in law. It must forever seek more and more sensation, more and more empty marvels, until there is nothing left and it has forgotten what true invention is.

Why ascribe meaning to all this? The further away from the fundamentals of life we go, the more we quest for their meaning. There is no meaning. It is here. It has always been here in some state. It will always be here. That is all we can ever truly know. It is all we should want to know.

“The marvelous is of necessity a lie, a distortion. At best it is a metaphor which leads to the truth. I think that I know what causes the World’s Pain, lady. Or at least I think I know what contributes to that Pain.”
“And what would that be, Ulrich von Bek?”
“By telling a single lie to oneself or to another, by denying a single fact of the world as it has been created, one adds to the World’s Pain. And pain, lady, creates pain. And one must not seek to become saint or sinner, God or Devil. One must seek to become human and to love the fact of one’s humanity.”
I became embarrassed. “That is all I have learned, lady.”
“It is all that Heaven demands,” she said.