Michael Moorcock Quotes

“Treasures are not won by care and forethought
but by swift slaying and reckless attack.”

“Legends are best left as legends and attempts to make them real are rarely successful”

Michael Moorcock book Elric of Melniboné

Source: Elric of Melniboné

“The book trade invented literary prizes to stimulate sales, not to reward merit.”

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

Michael Moorcock book The Land Leviathan

Book 1, Chapter 6 “A Haven of Civilization” (p. 214)
The Land Leviathan (1974)

“Americans need bullshit the way koala bears need eucalyptus leaves. They’ve become totally addicted to it. They get so much of it back home that they can’t survive without it.”

““So you are still our Master,” said Sabrina. She was frowning. She had come to be afraid again.
“Not so!” Lucifer turned, almost in rage. “You are your own masters. Your destiny is yours. Your lives are your own. Do you not see that this means an end to the miraculous? You are at the beginning of a new age for Man, an age of investigation and analysis.”
“The Age of Lucifer,” I said, echoing some of His own irony.
He saw the joke in it. He smiled.
“Man, whether he be Christian or pagan, must lean to rule himself, to understand himself, to take responsibility for himself. There can be no Armageddon now. If Man is destroyed, he shall have destroyed himself.”
“So we are to live without aid,” said Sabrina. Her face was clearing.
“And without hindrance,” said Lucifer. “It will be your fellows, your children and their children who will find the Cure for the World’s Pain.”
“Or perish in the attempt,” said I.
“It is a fair risk,” said Lucifer. “And you must remember, von Bek, that it is in my interest that you succeed. I have wisdom and knowledge at your disposal. I always had that gift for Man. And now that I may give it freely I choose not to do so. Each fragment of wisdom shall be earned. And it shall be hard-earned, captain.””

Source: Short fiction, London Bone (1997), p. 423

Michael Moorcock Quotes about the world

Michael Moorcock book The War Hound and the World's Pain

Source: The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), Chapter 18 (p. 166)

“Like most fanatics,” I pointed out coolly, “you share at least one characteristic with children—you want everything now. All improvements take time. You cannot make the world perfect overnight. Things are considerably better for more people today than they were in my—in the early years of this century, for instance.”

“There were three known existing sapphires. One was in the Conquest of Space Museum on Terra, one was in the hands of United System President Polonius Delph—he was the richest man in seven worlds, or had been until he’d paid cash for his jewel. The other had been stolen soon after its discovery. Maybe Delph had it…
“From what I understand of your world, Delph isn’t the only one who wants the sapphires. He has rivals in the Plutocracy. Another mysterious collector? Or those rivals are competing for the presidency or they think they can ruin him. As you know, it’s a vicious circle in politics. You can’t get to be president unless you have the wealth and you can’t really make massive sums until you’re president.””

Book 3, Chapter 1 “General O. T. Shaw” (p. 92)
Oswald Bastable, The Warlord of the Air (1971)

“Wild days, wild riders, and the stink of warfare across the world!”

Source: Short fiction, The Lost Canal (2013), p. 355

Michael Moorcock book The Sword of the Dawn

Book 1, Chapter 3 “Elvereza Tozer” (p. 269)
The Sword of the Dawn (1968)

“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.”

“Redefine the terms by which Man views the world, and thus eventually you redefine the world itself.”

Book 3, Chapter 4 (p. 669)
The Dragon in the Sword (1986)

“I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I'd rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas.”

Source: The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter (p. 367)

Michael Moorcock: Trending quotes

“Time is the enemy of identity”

Source: Elric: The Stealer of Souls

“It's History that's caused all the troubles in the past.”

“You have no proof of this,” I said.
“No. But a theory must be tested to be disproved, Mr Bastable.”

Michael Moorcock Quotes

“How paltry is the thing they call science. We have something far superior! We have Faith. We have a Force greater than Reason! We have a wisdom beyond mere knowledge. We have the Holy Grail itself. The Chalice of Limitless Power!”

Book 1, Chapter 8 “A Decision in Cold Blood” (p. 233)
Oswald Bastable, The Land Leviathan (1974)

“Oh, I believe very much in cause and effect,” she said, “but not in the linear sense. Every action has a proliferation of consequences. We can’t remain alive without being responsible for thousands of actions and their consequences. We simply have to live with that fact and decide, morally if you like, how to formulate a civilized, secure environment for ourselves. So far we haven’t succeeded.”

Book 3, Chapter 2 (p. 642; words spoken by Hitler)
The Dragon in the Sword (1986)

“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.””

Book 2, Chapter 8 “Revolutions” (p. 410)
Oswald Bastable, The Steel Tsar (1981)

Michael Moorcock book The Land Leviathan

Book 1, Chapter 2 “The Dream—and the Nightmare—of the Chilean Wizard” (p. 187)
The Land Leviathan (1974)

“It is many years since I have wielded a weapon larger than a pen, borne anything weightier than a difficult problem in philosophy.”

Michael Moorcock book The Runestaff

Book 3, Chapter 5 “Five Heroes and a Heroine” (p. 467)
The Runestaff (1969)

“By acting as they would act, we become what they are. And if we are what they are, then there is little point in resisting them!”

“Again that smile of exquisite and self-congratulatory piety.”

Book 2, Chapter 4 (p. 564)
The Dragon in the Sword (1986)

Michael Moorcock book The War Hound and the World's Pain

Source: The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), Chapter 8 (p. 98)

“I would be grateful if I was allowed to work out my own destiny for once,” I said. “For good or ill.”

Michael Moorcock Erekosë

Book 3 “Visions and Revelations” Chapter 4 “The Lady of the Chalice” (p. 416)
Erekosë, Phoenix in Obsidian (1970)

“The hardest compromise to make is when you decide to appear to compromise. Often the deception becomes the reality long before you realize it.”

Michael Moorcock book The Mad God's Amulet

Source: Book 1, Chapter 5 “The Machine” (p. 160), The Mad God's Amulet (1968)

““Are you still afraid?” I asked her.
“No,” she said, “I am thankful. The world has been threatened too long by the extraordinary, the supernatural and the monstrous. I shall be happy enough to smell the pines and hear the song of the thrush. And to be with you, Captain von Bek.”
“The world is still threatened,” I said to her, “but perhaps not by Lucifer. I held her hand tightly.”

Michael Moorcock book The War Hound and the World's Pain

Source: The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), Chapter 18 (p. 166)

“Here the idea of God has been replaced by the idea of the Future. The two notions are, admittedly, all but identical in the way in which they are self-contradictory and thus always fundamentally confusing to their worshippers, who must look to priests for translation, and so inevitably the priests (or whatever they call them) gradually take power…”

“He was a fool,” said Willow calmly to Klein. “There are many who refuse their responsibilities. Fooling themselves they search for a ‘higher ideal’. He was a fool.”
“What are responsibilities?” said Klein laconically. “He knows. Responsibility, my dear, is another word for self-interest. For survival.”

Book 2, Chapter 8 “Revolutions” (p. 413)
The Steel Tsar (1981)

“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.”

She looked at Klein uncomprehendingly.
Source: The Sundered Worlds (1965), Chapter 4 (p. 206)

““I shall not be killed!” The count smiled scornfully, as if death were something that only others suffered.”

Source: The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 9 (p. 310)

Michael Moorcock book The Jewel in the Skull

The Jewel in the Skull (1967)
Source: Book 1, Chapter 2 “Yisselda and Bowgentle” (p. 13)

“It’s never ‘should’ with engineers, my old friend, but ‘how’? Have you not learned that much?”

“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?”

Source: The von Bek family, The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 4 (p. 231)

Michael Moorcock book The War Hound and the World's Pain

Source: The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), Chapter 7 (pp. 85-86)

““In Hell you become what you fear yourself to be. In Heaven you may become what you hope yourself to be,” said Lucifer.”

Michael Moorcock book The War Hound and the World's Pain

Source: The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), Chapter 3 (p. 42)

“I had always claimed to welcome the truth; yet now, in common with most of us, I was resentful of the truth because it called upon me to take an unwelcome course of action.”

Michael Moorcock book The War Hound and the World's Pain

Source: The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), Chapter 4 (p. 55)

“I was wondering what made a decent English army officer turn into a desperate revolutionist overnight,” I smiled.
“It happens to many like that,” he said. “I have seen them. But you have to show them so much injustice first… Nobody wants to believe that the world is cruel—or that one’s own kind are cruel. Not to know cruelty is to remain innocent, eh? And we should all like to remain innocent. A revolutionist is a man who, perhaps, fails to keep his innocence but so desperately wants it back that he seeks to create a world where all shall be innocent in that way.”

“The captain seemed mad. Perhaps he did not enjoy his trade. Many soldiers did not, when real warfare developed.”

Book 3, Chapter 7 “Project NFB” (p. 135)
Oswald Bastable, The Warlord of the Air (1971)

“But we are all victims, Captain Bastable, just as in other ways we are all aggressors. At root we are victims to the comforting lies we tell ourselves, of our willingness to shift moral responsibility onto leaders, organized religion—onto a deity or a race, if all else fails. Onto God, onto politicians, onto creatures from other planets. It is always the same impulse, to refuse responsibility. If we do not take responsibility for our own actions, ultimately we perish.”

Book 1, Chapter 10 “Lost Hopes” (p. 336)
The Steel Tsar (1981)

“All Empires fall,
All ages die,
All strife shall be in vain.
All Kings go down,
All hope must fail,
But Tanelorn remains—
Our Tanelorn remains…”

Book 2, Chapter 7 “A Mechanical Man” (p. 395)
The Steel Tsar (1981)

Michael Moorcock book Phoenix in Obsidian

Book 2 “The Champion’s Road” Chapter 5 “The Black Sword” (p. 365)
Phoenix in Obsidian (1970)

“Once rich, moreover, I should again travel easily about Europe, for while in the public eye a poor radical is dangerous rogue, a rich radical is merely an eccentric gentleman!”

“His stated principle is that all knowledge should be at the public disposal. He argues against the hoarding of scientific discoveries, believing that the miserly act of secretion is in itself bound to produce fear and unnecessary caution in the mind of the citizen. Superstitious destruction of the unfamiliar is its most common expression. Prince Badehoff-Fischer argues that in such matters a secret is parallel, if not identical, to a lie. Both occur because one body seeks power over another.”

Source: The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 1 (p. 181)

“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.”

Source: The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 4 (p. 226)

““Are you aware we anticipate the Apocalypse, von Bek?”
“The obsession’s common enough, Montsorbier, amongst ignorant folk.””

Prologue (p. 463)
The Dragon in the Sword (1986)

“And then he pursed his lips in disgust. “Doubtless that was the result of supernatural interference with our brains! How I hate the supernatural!””

Source: The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 14 (p. 377)

Michael Moorcock book The Runestaff

Book 1, Chapter 5 “A City of Glowing Shadows” (p. 406)
The Runestaff (1969)

“Tyrants hate original thinking.”

“I must believe you doomed to eternal life, but also to eternal repetition! Your true doom is simple to me. You lack brains, Sir.”

The Warlord of the Air (1971)
Source: Book 3, Chapter 3 “Chi’ng Che’eng Ta-Chia” (p. 106)

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

Source: The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 14 (p. 376)

“She was grumbling. “The least he could have done was drop us near a town. Although in these parts they’d probably burn us as witches before asking any questions.” She shuddered. “I’m an awful snob about peasants, I’m afraid.”
I mentioned dryly that I thought those of her political persuasion had some sort of egalitarian duty to resist such prejudice. “Egalitarianism isn’t about prejudices,” she said, “it’s about equal shares of power. It’s the only means we have of steering some sort of even course through a future which is forever, by the very nature of the multiverse, unguessable. We have only institutions and a crude, fragile kind of democracy standing between us and absolute Chaos. That is why we must value and protect those institutions. And be forever reexamining them.””

Book 1, Chapter 8 “The Message” (p. 324)
The Steel Tsar (1981)

““There could be an end to all this, when the Lords of the Higher Worlds and all the machinery of cosmic mystery shall be no more. And perhaps that is why they fear mortals so much. The secret of their destruction, I suspect, lies in us, though we have yet to realize our own power.”
“And do you have a hint of what that power may be, Eternal Champion?” said Alisaard.
I smiled. “I think it is simply the power to conceive of a multiverse which has no need of the supernatural, which, indeed, could abolish it if so desired!””

Book 2, Chapter 8 “Revolutions” (p. 419)
The Steel Tsar (1981)

“Nothing is known for certain, Isarda. All knowledge is illusion—purpose is a meaningless word, a mere sound, a reassuring fragment of melody in a cacophony of clashing chords. All is flux—matter is like these jewels. (She throws a handful of gleaming gems upon the golden surface; they scatter. When the last jewel has ceased to move, she looks up at him.) Sometimes they fall into a rough pattern, usually they do not. So as this moment, a pattern has been formed—you and I stand here speaking. But at any moment that which constitutes our beings may be scattered again.”

Book 3, Chapter 2 (p. 646)
The Dragon in the Sword (1986)

Michael Moorcock book Phoenix in Obsidian

Prologue (p. 321)
Phoenix in Obsidian (1970)

“She is in other words a classic demagogue,” said von Bek…“It was Hitler’s secret that he could seem one thing to one group and an entirely different thing to another. That is how they rise so swiftly to power. These creatures are bizarre. They can virtually change shape and colour. They have an amophous quality and yet at the same time they have a will to dominate others which is unrelenting, almost their only consistent trait, their only reality.”

Michael Moorcock Erekosë

Book 2, Chapter 9 (p. 612)
Erekosë, The Dragon in the Sword (1986)

“I stared at the water and saw the clouds reflected in it, saw them break to reveal the moon. It was the same moon I had known as John Daker. The same bland face could be made out staring down in contentment at the antics of the creatures of the planet it circled. How many disasters had that moon witnessed? How many foolish crusades? How many wars and battles and murders?”

Michael Moorcock book The Eternal Champion

Source: The Eternal Champion (1970), Chapter 9 “At Noonos” (p. 50)

““I understand you now. But surely, if Lucifer is successful, we shall all be saved.”
The Wildgrave’s smile was bitter. “What logic provides you with that hope, von Bek? If God is merciful, He provides us with little evidence.””

Michael Moorcock book The War Hound and the World's Pain

Source: The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), Chapter 6 (p. 79)

“This could be the beginning of Civil War. There is no kind more distressing, no kind which so rapidly describes the pointlessness of human killing human. I have been fated, for a reason I cannot comprehend or for no reason at all, to witness the worst examples of insane warfare (and all warfare, it seems to me now, is that) and having to listen to the most ridiculous explanations as to its “necessity” from otherwise perfectly rational people, I have long since become weary, Moorcock, of the debate. If I appear to you to be in a more reconciled mood than when your grandfather first met me it is because I have learned that no individual is responsible for War—that we are all, at the same time, individually responsible for the ills of the human condition. In learning this, (and I am about to tell you how I learned it) I also learned a certain tolerance for myself and for others which I had never previously possessed.”

“To me politics is just a matter of getting the engineering right. If you have a machine which functions properly without much attention, then it’s obviously a good machine. That’s what politics should be about. And if the machine has simple working parts which any layman can understand, then it’s, as it were, your democratic machine. Am I right or am I wrong?”
“Crazy,” said Makhno, and scratched his nose.
“What?”

Book 2, Chapter 4 “The Black Ships” (p. 359)
The Steel Tsar (1981)

“Your imagination is notoriously poor. Not everyone holds identical ambitions to your own!”

“You’re not right or wrong. You’re crazy.”
Book 2, Chapter 1 “The Camp on Rishiri” (p. 342)
Oswald Bastable, The Steel Tsar (1981)

“In other words, the listener’s own picture was painted in the shining coulours St Odhran provided. By seeing what they wished, they also saw what he wished them to see. “They are the Orchestra,” he had told me earlier, “and I am merely the Conductor.””

Book 2, Chapter 4 (p. 560)
The Dragon in the Sword (1986)

“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?”

Source: The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 6 (p. 269)

Michael Moorcock book The Eternal Champion

Introduction (p. viii)
The Eternal Champion (1970)

“My own self-deception at least promised some kind of pleasure. Theirs offered nothing but terror and guilt.”

“Light suddenly caught the steel of his helmet and made it burn like the face of some mighty fallen angel. It could have been the face of Lucifer himself. I felt then that he was perfectly capable of destroying the whole world without a shred of remorse if he believed that he could not, himself, go on living. Such creatures, I remember thinking, have always dwelt among us. They would reduce the multiverse to ash, if they could. Why, I agonized, can we not recognize them and stop them before they achieve so much power? A tiny part of the human race was responsible for the misery of the majority.
I thought again of the injustices which we ourselves casually perpetrated and I wondered how we should ever set anything to rights while we continued to allow such vast discrepancy, so much at odds with the religious and political principles we claim as our daily guides.”

Source: The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 14 (p. 375)

“Her smile was all pride. I had seen many like her in the past. She believed herself cleverer than she was because it suited others to let her maintain that delusion.”

Book 2, Chapter 7 “A Mechanical Man” (p. 386)
The Steel Tsar (1981)

““You fought well and you fought for justice.”
“Justice?” Hawkmoon called after him as he left the room. “Is there such a thing?”
“It can be manufactured in small quantities,” Fank told him. “But we have to work hard, fight well and use great wisdom to produce just a tiny amount.””

Book 2, Chapter 4 (p. 561)
The Dragon in the Sword (1986)

Michael Moorcock book The Runestaff

Book 3, Chapter 17 “The Sad Queen” (p. 501)
The Runestaff (1969)

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

“No denial would convince you,” D’Averc smiled, “so I will not offer you one.”

Source: The von Bek family, The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 8 (p. 291)

Michael Moorcock The History of the Runestaff

Book 2, Chapter 1 “The Waiting Warrior” (p. 185)
The History of the Runestaff, The Mad God's Amulet (1968)

“For this was the great power of the Lords of the Dark Empire, that they valued nothing on all the Earth, no human quality, nothing within or without themselves. The spreading of conquest and desolation, of terror and torment, was their staple entertainment, a means of employing their hours until their spans of life were ended. For them, warfare was merely the most satisfactory way of easing their ennui…”

Michael Moorcock book The Sword of the Dawn

Book 1, Chapter 1 “The Last City” (p. 259)
The Sword of the Dawn (1968)

“The English, I now know, eat mashed fish and deviled sheep’s hearts to guarantee a bad digestion (and consequent irritability). It is their abominable cooking which has given them half the world as their Empire.”

“I had sampled several such brotherhoods, including the Rosey Cross and the Orange Lodge, during the period in which I examined the Supernatural and found it not merely uninstructive but damnably dull, its members possessing nothing in the way of individual imagination and a great need to seek confirmation in numbers for the merits of miserable little madnesses…. Such people as a rule were lonely, confounded misfits, attempting to alter the surrounding evidence of Nature by inventing abstractions to explain why common facts were false and ordinary reality a poor illusion.”

Source: The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 5 (p. 245)