Michael Moorcock: Power (page 2)

“Scholarly men were suspect in my town. Women could not admit to scholarship at all. Men are afraid of two things in this world, it seems—women and knowledge. Both threaten their power, eh?”

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

Source: The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), Chapter 2 (p. 31)

Women , Men , World , Knowledge

“You desire power only for that most selfish of all ends, and therefore you know no boundaries in the seeking and the gaining of it.”

Michael Moorcock

Book 2, Chapter 2 “In Which Old Acquaintances Are Resumed and New Agreements Reached” (p. 226)
The Elric Cycle, The Revenge of the Rose (1991)

Selfishness

“Elric was recollecting what was best and noblest in his own people and in himself, and even as he celebrated this he mourned the self-obsessed creatures they had become, using their power merely to preserve their power and that, he supposed, was true decay…”

Michael Moorcock

Book 1, Chapter 1 “Of Love, Death, Battle & Exile” (pp. 144-145)
The Elric Cycle, The Revenge of the Rose (1991)

Self-confidence , People

“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.”

Michael Moorcock

Book 3, Chapter 2 “The Destruction in the Fortress” (p. 260)
The Elric Cycle, The Fortress of the Pearl (1989)

Making love

“We have a scanty notion of justice and the obligations of rule involve little more than inventing new terrors by which we may cow and control others. Power, I think, is a habit as terrible as the potion I must now sip in order to sustain myself. It feeds upon itself. It is a hungry beast, devouring those who would possess it and those who hate it—devouring even those who own it.”

Michael Moorcock

Book 1, Chapter 5 “The Dreamthief’s Pledge” (p. 183)
The Elric Cycle, The Fortress of the Pearl (1989)

Thinking , Hate , Justice

“This was Elric’s dream, more coherent now than it had ever been. This was his dream and it was why he traveled the world, why he refused the power which was his, why he risked his life, his mind, his love and everything else he valued, for he believed that there was no life worth living that was not risked in pursuit of knowledge and justice. And this was why his fellow countrymen feared him. Justice was not obtained, he believed, by administration but by experience. One must know what it was to suffer humiliation and powerlessness; at least to some degree, before one could entirely appreciate its effect. One must give up power if one was to achieve true justice. This was not the logic of Empire, but it was the logic of one who truly loved the world and desired to see an age dawn when all people would be free to pursue their ambitions in dignity and self-respect.”

Michael Moorcock

Book 1, Chapter 3 “On the Red Road” (p. 160)
The Elric Cycle, The Fortress of the Pearl (1989)

Fear , Justice , Dreams , Suffering

“The albino reflected on the power of the human mind to build a fantasy and then defend it with complete determination as a reality.”

Michael Moorcock

Book 1, Chapter 2 “The Pearl at the Heart of the World” (p. 139)
The Elric Cycle, The Fortress of the Pearl (1989)

Reality

“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.”

Michael Moorcock Erekosë

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

World , Fear , Secret