Alan Moore Quotes

Alan Moore is an English writer most famous for his influential work in comics, including the acclaimed graphic novels Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell. (I really like Promethea too)

"There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse is often closer to the truth." Swamp Thing

"We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings." Dr. Manhattan, Watchmen #9

"In fact, let us not mince words… the management is terrible! We’ve had a string of embezzlers, frauds, liars, and lunatics making a string of catastrophic decisions. This is plain fact. But who elected them? It was you! You who appointed these people! You who gave them the power to make decisions for you! While I’ll admit that anyone can make a mistake once, to go on making the same lethal errors century after century seems to me to be nothing short of deliberate. You have encouraged these malicious incompetents, who have made your working life a shambles. You have accepted without question their senseless orders. You have allowed them to fill your workplace with dangerous and unproven machines. All you had to say was “No.” You have no spine. You have no pride. You are no longer an asset to the company." V for Vendetta

"Did you think to kill me? There's no flesh and blood within this cloak to kill. There is only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof." V for Vendetta

"Truth is a well-known pathological liar. It invariably turns out to be Fiction wearing a fancy frock.. Self-proclaimed Fiction, on the other hand, is entirely honest. You can tell this, because it comes right out and says, "I'm a Liar," right there on the dust jacket."

"Consciousness is unquantifiable, a ghost in the machine, barely considered real at all, though in a sense this flickering mosaic of awareness is the only true reality that we can ever know."

"The entire universe — for one thing — only exists in your perceptions. That's all you're gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that's being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality."

"Ancient cultures did not worship idols. Their god-statues represented ideal states which, when meditated constantly upon, one might aspire to. Science proves there never was a mermaid, blue-skinned Krishna or a virgin birth in physical reality. Yet thought is real, and the domain of thought is the one place where gods inarguably exist, wielding tremendous power. If Aphrodite were a myth and Love only a concept, then would that negate the crimes and kindnesses and songs done in Love's name? If Christ were only ever fiction, a divine Idea, would this invalidate the social change inspired by that idea, make holy wars less terrible, or human betterment less real, less sacred?"

"To some degree Satanism is purely a kind of disease of Christianity. You've got to really be Christian to believe in Satan."

"Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception."

"Yes, there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of conspiracies that are all tripping each other up. And all of those conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists and ham-fisted clowns. If you are on a list targeted by the CIA, you really have nothing to worry about. If however, you have a name similar to somebody on a list targeted by the CIA, then you are dead."

"The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the 12 foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control. The truth is more frightening, nobody is in control. The world is rudderless."

Check out the Alan Moore videos Monsters, Maniacs & Moore and Mindscape: Perception