Michael Moorcock

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.

We’ll build a world where Order shall prevail. A few more deaths are inconsequential, surely, if they guarantee us eternal life and absolute fulfillment?

Better wicked Lucifer for a master, thought I, than a pious Tyrant!

He had thought his wars over. Now he realized peace had been merely a lull.

Do you know what damnation can be, Sir? It can be a state of permanent caution, making one chronically unable to risk anything, even a risk which might save one from extinction.

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.

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

If you were to believe all the old, degenerate German legends, there’s a Grail in every castle, a Charlemagne or an Arthur under every mound! There not a noble house without at least one werewolf offspring or a younger son who’s made a pact with the Devil, an uncle practising the profane arts of alchemy, a vampirical grandfather, a mad monk, a ruined abbey in the grounds where witches meet, an incarcerated lunatic (or heiress—or both), an infanticide or two (and a patricide), and, of course, a family ghost.

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

Thus woman trusts in man down all the years and so, as always, is betrayed.

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

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