“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.”

— Michael Moorcock

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

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Michael Moorcock 224

English writer, editor, critic 1939

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Michael Moorcock 224

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