Michael Moorcock: Trending quotes (page 4)

“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.”

Michael Moorcock book The City in the Autumn Stars

Source: The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 3 (p. 210; ellipsis represents a minor elision of description)

People , Way , Imagination , Nature

“He existed in all the many dimensions of the multiverse. Yet he, in common with all others, was bound by the dimension of Time. He had cast off the chains of space but was tied, as perhaps all denizens of the multiverse would always be, by the imperturbable prowl of Time, which brooked no halt, which condoned no tampering with its movement, whether to slow it or to speed it.
Time, the changer, could not be changed. Space, perhaps, the material environment, could be conquered. Time, never.”

Michael Moorcock

Source: The Sundered Worlds (1965), Chapter 15 (p. 290)

Change , Time , Speed

“He’s vain. His vanity’s hurt by the world’s refusal to accept his remedies and become immediately Enlightened. And what does a vain man do when insulted, Sir?”…“He lashes out, Sir,” says I. “He seeks to portion blame. He fumes, Sir. He attacks. In the case before us, such is his despotic power, he kills. He kills, Sir. He wars on other nations. Mary’s blood, Sir, but this poor sphere of ours suffers more from the single, frustrated egoist than from any natural—or supernatural—misery. Your own Church’s history, Sir, illustrates my point well enough, eh? We are too frequently in the power of mad children, who rage and stamp and break Kingdoms as they break toys. They order thousands of deaths a day as if they were spoiled brats kicking at their dolls!”

Michael Moorcock

Source: The von Bek family, The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 2 (pp. 197-198; ellipsis represents a minor elision of description)

Death , War , Children , World

“You were both catalysts,” Mrs Persson told me, “no more than that. Do you still not realize your error? No individual can claim so much personal guilt. It is madness to do so. We are all guilty of supporting the circumstances, the self-deceptions, the misconceptions and misinformation which lead to War. Every lie we tell ourselves brings an evil like the destruction of Hiroshima closer. We drown in our lies.”

Michael Moorcock

Book 2, Chapter 7 “A Mechanical Man” (p. 394)
Oswald Bastable, The Steel Tsar (1981)

War , Lie , Error , Support

““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.””

Michael Moorcock

Book 3, Chapter 2 (p. 637)
The Dragon in the Sword (1986)

Hate , Religion , Way , History

“Let us say that those who do insist on a hearing will be silenced soon enough. There is a monotonous pattern to the rise of tyrants which, I suppose, is reflected in the general pattern of human folly. Depressing though it is, we must accept the fact.”

Michael Moorcock

Book 2, Chapter 5 (p. 568)
The Dragon in the Sword (1986)

Silence

“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.”

Michael Moorcock book The Steel Tsar

Book 2, Chapter 5 “A Question of Attitudes” (p. 370)
The Steel Tsar (1981)

“It had been some years since I had lost my Faith, save in my own capacity to survive a world at War, but evidently in the back of my mind there had always been some sense that through God one might find salvation. Now, as I journeyed in quest of the Holy Grail (or something identified as the Holy Grail), I not only questioned the possibility that salvation existed; I questioned whether God’s salvation was worth the earning. Again I began to see the struggle between God and Lucifer as nothing more than a squabble between petty princelings over who should possess power in a tiny, unimportant territory. The fate of the tenants of that territory did not much seem to matter to them; and even the reward of those tenants’ loyalty seemed thin enough to me.”

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

Source: The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), Chapter 8 (pp. 91-92)

God , Fate , War , World

““I shall know soon.” I hesitated. “I shall know if all these adventurings, all these ordeals, have been meaningless or not. Man struggles in the belief that he can, by dint of perseverance, affect his own destiny. And all those efforts, I think, lead to nothing but ruin.”

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

Source: The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), Chapter 15 (p. 149)

Thinking , Effort , Perseverance

“Did God truly build and populate a small planet for His own purposes; perhaps merely to relieve His boredom?”

Michael Moorcock book The City in the Autumn Stars

Source: The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 8 (p. 294)

God

“Everything means nothing—that is the only truth.”

Michael Moorcock

Source: Short fiction, To Rescue Tanelorn... (1962), p. 472

Truth

“Can Hell and Heaven be merely the difference between ignorance and knowledge?”

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

Source: The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), Chapter 16 (p. 158)

Hell , Knowledge

“Wasn’t all their effort worthless? Wouldn’t it be better to accept the impossibility of their mission? He began to think Krane was mad. If there were a threat, then inevitably they would die. Death was the future of all people, all planets, all universes. Their struggle was symbolic of the futility of living creatures who fought against their own inevitable extinction. What were a few more years of existence compared to the longevity of a cosmos? In those terms, the whole history of their species lasted for less than a fraction of a second. And then, sheltering beside him under the protection of the energy equalizer, she looked up for a second, and, obscurely, he understood that the effort always would be worth it. Always had been worth it.”

Michael Moorcock

Source: Short fiction, The Lost Canal (2013), p. 371

Death , People , History , Thinking

“There must be countless forms of love. Which is the form which conquers the rest? I cannot define it. I shall not try.”

Michael Moorcock book The Eternal Champion

Source: The Eternal Champion (1970), Chapter 15 “The Returning” (p. 91)

Love

“Destiny was apparently a word describing an individual’s desperate need for certainty.”

Michael Moorcock book The City in the Autumn Stars

Source: The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 12 (p. 349)

“It is almost impossible to have a baseless snobbish opinion of the General Theory of Relativity.”

Michael Moorcock

Fantastic Metropolis, Christmas Editorial (http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/20011209/3/)

“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.”

Michael Moorcock

Source: Short fiction, London Bone (1997), p. 443

Hope

““What more could you need?”
I smiled in self-mockery. “Reassurance, I suppose.”
“That must come from your own judgment, from your own testing of your conscience. It is the only kind of reassurance worth having, as I’m sure you would agree.””

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

Source: The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), Chapter 10 (p. 112)

Smile

“I have learned from my experiences that hatred and racial antagonism can be manufactured by the politicians of any one country against any other, so I was no longer the patriot I had been.”

Michael Moorcock book The Steel Tsar

Book 2, Chapter 2 “Back in Service” (p. 350)
The Steel Tsar (1981)

Learning , Country

“I said: “Then in reality I had little choice.”
“Let us say that your character has already determined your choice.””

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

Source: The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), Chapter 3 (p. 48)

Reality