Michael Moorcock Quotes

Alain left the cell, left Police Headquarters and stood for a long time by a splashing fountain, staring into the clear water and watching the darting goldfish swimming in the narrow confines of the pool. Did they understand just how narrow their little universe was? he wondered. They seemed happy enough, if fish could be happy. But if they weren’t happy, he reflected, neither were they sad. They had no tradition but instinct, no ritual but the quest for food and a mate. He didn’t envy them much.

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.

It’s what they call a “theocracy”—priest-ridden in the extreme, full of dark superstitions and darker myths and legends, where all gods and demons are honoured, doubtless to be on the safe side. The people are cruel, ignorant, dirty and proud—they look down their noses at all other races.

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

As I suggested to John Major (a British Prime Minister) when he told us that socialism was dead, he should not be too triumphant. After all, until his predecessor Mrs Thatcher revived it, we thought feudalism pretty much over and done with, too.

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.

And upon those three lies was Elric’s destiny to be built, for it is only about things which concern us most profoundly that we lie clearly and with profound conviction.

Time is at once an agony of the Present, a long torment of the Past and the terrible prospect of countless Futures. Time is also a complex of subtly intersecting realities, of unguessable consequences and undiscoverable causes, of profound tensions and dependencies.

I would waste my rhetoric if I tried, for men are greedy and will not see the truth for the gleam of coin.

We are all guilty," he said. "We are all innocent. Only when we accept responsibility for our own actions do we become free. And only when every one of us accepts their share of responsibility will the world become safe for us all.

Better wicked Lucifer for a master, thought I, than a pious Tyrant!

Perhaps I should not say so, but it occasionally crosses my mind to wonder why, in all the mystic cosmologies, even in some of the modern so-called parasciences, our own age is always described as the age of chaos and contention. A comment, my logical side argues, on why people turn to mysticism. The past age was always better."
"Childhood is the happiest time of life except when you're a child," said Jerry.
"I understand you. True.

Fear was back and with it the old terrors, the old mental aberrations, the old superstitions, the old religions. He knew the pattern. He had studied it in the text books. He knew how little power rational argument had when faced with minds turned sick by fear. He knew how quickly a cult of the kind he had seen could proliferate and dominate a society and then split internally and become several warring sects.

An ethic is simply a system of survival," Velusi said. "What does an ethic mean when there is no chance of survival?

Better the myth of happiness," Harlequin murmured, "than the myth of despair.