Top 100 Edgar Rice Burroughs Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “It is strange how new and unexpected conditions bring out unguessed ability to meet them.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

52. “We must not give ourselves time to think, for in that direction lies madness.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

53. “P33- the wail of the living had answered the call of universal motherhood within her wild beast which the dead could not still.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

54. “A thousand times rather face the wild hordes of the dead sea bottoms than meet the eyes of this beautiful young girl and tell her the thing that I must tell her.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

55. “Dear old Woola,” she said; “no love could be deeper than yours, yet it never offends. Would that men might pattern themselves after you!”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

56. “Even brave men, and D’Arnot was a brave man, are sometimes frightened by solitude.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

57. “I understand that you belittle all sentiments of generosity and kindness, but I do not, and I can convince your most doughty warrior that these characteristics are not incompatible with an ability to fight.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

58. “Were there no desire there would be no virtue, and because one man desires what another does not, who shall say whether the child of his desire be Vice or Virtue?”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

59. “Men were indeed more foolish and more cruel than the beasts of the jungle! How fortunate was he who lived in the peace and security of the great forest!”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

60. “John!” cried Lady Greystoke, running toward him, “how could I have been mistaken? I-” but the rest of the sentence was lost as Tarzan of the Apes sprang into the room and taking his mate in his arms covered her lips with kisses.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

61. “As much as I enjoy a fight, I cannot always indulge myself, and just now I had more weighty matters to occupy my time than spilling the blood of strange warriors.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

62. “My attention was quickly riveted by a large red star close to the distant horizon. As I gazed upon it I felt a spell of overpowering fascination – it was Mars, the god of war, and for me, the fighting man, it had always held the power of irresistible enchantment. As I gazed at it on that far-gone night it seemed to call across the unthinkable void, to lure me to it, to draw me as the lodestone attracts a particle of iron.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

63. “Captain Billings,” he drawled finally, “if you will pardon my candor, I might remark that you are something of an ass.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

64. “It had become evident to Tarzan that without money one must die. D’Arnot had told him not to worry, since he had more than enough for both, but the ape-man was learning many things and one of them was that people looked down upon one who accepted money from another without giving something of equal value in exchange.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

65. “We all loved him, and our slaves fairly worshipped the ground he trod.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

66. “I could write stories just as rotten.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

67. “It is a strange tale and utterly Barsoomian.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

68. “I have discovered that the world over, unusual weather prevails at all times of the year.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

69. “P43- that the huge, fierce brute loved this child of another race is beyond question.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

70. “And so he learned to read. From then on his progress was rapid.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

71. “It is quite simple, being nothing more than a radium generator diffusing radio-activity in all directions to a distance of a hundred yards or so from the flier. Should.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

72. “Day had now given away to night and as we wandered along the great avenue lighted by the two moons of Barsoom, and with Earth looking down upon us out of her luminous green eye, it seemed that we were alone in the universe, and I, at least, was content that it should be so.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

73. “From a lofty perch Tarzan viewed the village of thatched huts across the intervening plantation.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

74. “I had aimed at Mars and was about to hit Venus; unquestionably the all-time cosmic record for poor shots.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

75. “I wish to Heaven that I might forget. It would be so much easier than to go through life always remembering what might have been.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

76. “Why does The Sheik, my father, not love me, too?”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

77. “Teach me to speak the language of men.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

78. “Waking or sleeping, it seemed that she constantly saw that dark body dropping, swift and silent, into the cold, grim sea.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

79. “P38- little tarzan, which was the name they had given to the tiny lord greystoke and which meant white skin.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

80. “Jane saw the little note and ignored it, for she was very angry and hurt and mortified, but – she was a woman, and so eventually she picked it up and read it. MY.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

81. “If your vocation be shoeing horses, or painting pictures, and you can do one or the other better than your fellows, then you are a fool if you are not proud of your ability. And so I am very proud that upon two planets no greater fighter has ever lived than John Carter, Prince of Helium.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

82. “She realized the spell that had been upon her in the depths of that far-off jungle, but there was no spell of enchantment now in prosaic Wisconsin.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

83. “I should at least die as I had lived – fighting.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

84. “Give a Martian woman a chance and death must take a back seat.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

85. “I saw that argument was useless and said no more; there is no use arguing with a man who can multiply anything by the square root of minus one.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

86. “I loathed poverty and I would have liked to put my hands on the party who said that poverty is an honorable estate. It is an indication of inefficiency and nothing more. There is nothing honorable or fine about it.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

87. “I had learned from Kantos Kan the secret of opening these gates, and in another moment my twenty great fighting men stood within the doomed city of Zodanga.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

88. “I am like my father – witless in matters of the heart, and of a poor way with women; yet the jewels that strew these royal garden paths – the trees, the flowers, the sward – all must have read the love that has filled my heart since first my eyes were made new by imaging your perfect face and form; so how could you alone have been blind to it?”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

89. “Subconscious minds are no less fallible than the objective mind.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

90. “Lives there upon any world such another as John Carter, Prince of Helium? Lives there another man who could fight his way back and forth across a warlike planet, facing savage beasts and hordes of savage men, for the love of a woman?”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

91. “I at once ordered a secret search within the city, for every Martian noble maintains a secret service of his own.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

92. “There is much which I have left out; much which I have not dared to tell; but you will find the story of his second search for Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium, even more remarkable than was his first.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

93. “And what difference does it make, anyway, what you like and what you don’t like? You are here for but an instant, and you mustn’t take yourself too seriously.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

94. “So this was love! I had escaped it for all the years I had roamed the five continents and their encircling seas; in spite of beautiful women and urging opportunity; in spite of a half-desire for love and a constant search for my ideal, it had remained for me to fall furiously and hopelessly in love with a creature from another world, of a species similar possibly, yet not identical with mine.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

95. “Traveling through space is stupifyingly monotonous.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

96. “One does not judge the gazelle by the lions that attack it.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

97. “The scene he witnessed there in the twilight depths of the African jungle was burned forever into the Englishman’s brain.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

98. “There was no means by which I might know, and so I chose the center opening as being as likely to lead me in the right direction as another. Here.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

99. “Ah, John, I wish that I might be a man with a man’s philosophy, but I am but a woman, seeing with my heart rather than my head, and all that I can see is too horrible, too unthinkable to put into words.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

100. “I fear that there is something more serious than accident here, Mr. Brently,” said the captain.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs