Michael Moorcock quotes

Michael Moorcock is an English writer, best known for his influential works in fantasy and science fiction, particularly the Elric of Melniboné series. His novels and editing of New Worlds magazine helped shape the New Wave science fiction movement. He continues to inspire generations of writers with his imaginative worlds and innovative storytelling. Here are 257 of his quotes:

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...

Michael Moorcock

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?

Michael Moorcock

Everything means nothing-that is the only truth.

Michael Moorcock

It's getting late. I must return to my ship or my men will think I've drowned and be celebrating.

Michael Moorcock

Men may trust men, Prince Elric, but perhaps we'll never have a truly sane world until men learn to trust mankind. That would mean the death of magic, I think.

Michael Moorcock

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

Michael Moorcock

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

Here, I thought, I had found the human race in its final stages of decadence-perverse, insouciant, without ambition. And I could not blame them. After all, they had no future.

Michael Moorcock

The subtlest lie of all is the full truth.

Michael Moorcock

Because I had sought to challenge Destiny, Destiny had taken vengeance.

Michael Moorcock

Destiny's Champion, Fate's fool. Eternity's Soldier, Time's Tool.

Michael Moorcock

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.

Michael Moorcock

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

Michael Moorcock

Here the idea of God has been replaced by the idea of the Future.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...

Michael Moorcock

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

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

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.”.

Michael Moorcock

Better the myth of happiness, than the myth of despair.

Michael Moorcock

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.

Michael Moorcock

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

Michael Moorcock

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

Michael Moorcock

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?

Michael Moorcock