Top 60 Fritz Leiber Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There was always something new to be seen in the unchanging night sky.”

— Fritz Leiber

2. “Better freedom and a chilly road than a warm hearth and servitude.”

— Fritz Leiber

3. “Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher’s stone. That was the pebble by the seashore he really wanted to find.”

— Fritz Leiber

4. “Of course, if you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including the cosmos itself.”

— Fritz Leiber

5. “Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards.”

— Fritz Leiber

6. “Devils may be nothing but beings intent on their purpose, which now happens to collide with yours.”

— Fritz Leiber

7. “But at the same time, I swore an oath by the morning star to avenge the deaths of Vilis and Hinerio. And some day I shall! With proper plans and help and a new cover. More than one high potentate of the Thieves’ Guild will learn how it feels to have his weasand narrowed a fingerclip’s breadth at a time, aye, and worse things!”

— Fritz Leiber

8. “There was an omnipresent sense of crisis.”

— Fritz Leiber

9. “Then he turned and headed straight for home, but he took the long way, around the world.”

— Fritz Leiber

10. “What do you care? You always liked loneliness better than you liked people. No offence liking yourself’s the beginning of all love.”

— Fritz Leiber

11. “Ningauble shrugged. You’re a hero. You should know.”

— Fritz Leiber

12. “Traffic growled and snarled, rising at times to a machine-gun rata-tat-tat, while pedestrians were scuttling about with that desperate ratlike urgency characteristic of all big American cities, but which reaches its ultimate in New York.”

— Fritz Leiber

13. “What was life worth, anyway, if you had to sit around remembering not to mention this, that, and the other thing because someone else might be upset?”

— Fritz Leiber

14. “The right to take a chance, the right to suffer. The right to be unwise, the right to die. These aims are hateful to the government, which values ever frightened mouse and falling sparrow as equal to a tiger burning bright.”

— Fritz Leiber

15. “Then time seemed to stop, or rather to lose its directional urgency of movement; it became a place in the open where one stood rather than a low, narrow corridor down which one was hurried.”

— Fritz Leiber

16. “After all, to the truly skeptical mind, diabolic forces are just as reasonable building blocks for the cosmos as mindless electrons. No possibility, however seemingly fantastic, should revolt the truly skeptical mind.”

— Fritz Leiber

17. “What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture, like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers, and everything else worthwhile. And that’s as true for the last man as the first.”

— Fritz Leiber

18. “The gods spend the wealth the universe gathers, they scan the wonders and fling them to nothingness. That’s why they’re the gods! I told you they were devils.”

— Fritz Leiber

19. “Minds festooned with error, barnacled with bias, swollen with delusions of godhead.”

— Fritz Leiber

20. “A practical man can always make what he wants to do look like a noble sacrifice of personal inclinations to the welfare of the community.”

— Fritz Leiber

21. “A scientist ought to have a healthy disregard for coincidences.”

— Fritz Leiber

22. “There are vampires and vampires, and not all of them suck blood.”

— Fritz Leiber

23. “If guilt’s a luxury, then I’m a plutocrat.”

— Fritz Leiber

24. “Minds altogether horrible in their power, and in their ignorance – which their power protected.”

— Fritz Leiber

25. “By the hedgehog,’ said the smaller, grinning wickedly, ’but they’ll think twice before they play at ambuscades again!”

— Fritz Leiber

26. “Also, in the dismal Cold Waste, any man treasures illusions, though knowing them almost certainly to be such.”

— Fritz Leiber

27. “Things are different from what I thought. They’re much worse.”

— Fritz Leiber

28. “We have searched the wide world over and not found forgetfulness.”

— Fritz Leiber

29. “At that instant the hag’s noisy breathing stopped and with it all other sound. Her eyes opened, showing only whites – milky ovals infinitely eerie in the dark root-tangle of her sharp features and stringy hair. The gray tip of her tongue traveled like a large maggot around her lips.”

— Fritz Leiber

30. “From all around came very faintly a low sad hum, as the unhoused bees mourned.”

— Fritz Leiber

31. “Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age’s vaunted ‘communications industry’ had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other.”

— Fritz Leiber

32. “He who lies artistically, treads closer to the truth than ever he knows.”

— Fritz Leiber

33. “Girls are for dessert.”

— Fritz Leiber

34. “I abominate any organization that denies cats are people!”

— Fritz Leiber

35. “That is the trouble with a clear mind. For a little while you see things as they really are and you can accurately predict how they’re going to shape the future... and then suddenly you realize you’ve predicted yourself a week or a month into the future and you can’t live the intervening time any more because you’ve already imagined it in detail.”

— Fritz Leiber

36. “Lankhmar City would feed me, aye, feed me well – and be paid only with lumps and perhaps a deep scratch or two. So to Lankhmar I went. Falling in there with a clever girl of the same turn of mind and some experience, I did well for two full rounds of moons and a few more. We worked only in black garb, and called ourselves to ourselves the Dark Duo.”

— Fritz Leiber

37. “Still, it appears that someone doesn’t like us,” Fafhrd opined. “Was that ever news!” the Gray Mouser retorted.”

— Fritz Leiber

38. “Then the hut was moving inland too on its five spindly legs. It turned around, so that its door faced away from them, and its speed increased, its legs moving nimbly as those of a cockroach, and was soon lost amongst the tangle of thorn and seahawk trees. So ended the first encounter of the Mouser and his comrade Fafhrd with Sheelba of the Eyeless Face.”

— Fritz Leiber

39. “It was odd how old buildings had secret spaces in them that weren’t really hidden but were never noticed;.”

— Fritz Leiber

40. “Actors make great sacrifices, which the yokels and even their co-mates rarely appreciate.”

— Fritz Leiber

41. “My Mrs. Willis thinks the skyscrapers are out to get her. At night they make themselves still skinnier, she says, and come sneaking down the streets after her.”

— Fritz Leiber

42. “There are laws of hate in the universe, shaping even its loves, and it is time I made them work for me.”

— Fritz Leiber

43. “Don’t follow it, Fafhrd,” the Mouser repeated – a little hopelessly, almost whiningly, it must be admitted. “Don’t follow it, I say. It leads only to squidgy death. We can still go back up the rope, aye, and take your loot with us.”

— Fritz Leiber

44. “But Anra was far cleverer than I at reading. He loved letters as passionately as I did the outside. For him, they were alive. I remember shim showing me some Egyptian hieroglyphs and telling me that they were all animals and insects. And then he showed me some Egyptian hieratics and demotics and told me those were the same animals in disguise. But Hebrew, he said, was best of all, for each letter was a magic charm.”

— Fritz Leiber

45. “And Ningauble began to sort out in his mind the details of the Mouser’s story, treasuring it the more because he knew it was an improvisation, his favorite proverb being, “He who lies artistically, treads closer to the truth than ever he knows.”

— Fritz Leiber

46. “Whoever’d think, Mr. Wong, they could put nine hours and maybe ten of good, good darkness into such a tiny time-capsule, a gelatin spaceship bound for the stars.”

— Fritz Leiber

47. “Know it or not, man treads between twin abysses a tightrope that has neither beginning nor end.”

— Fritz Leiber

48. “No, I ran afoul of a law older even than Lankhmar’s and a court less merciful. In short, my friend’s and my own cover was finally blown by the Thieves’ Guild, a most ancient organization with locals in every city of the civilized world with a hidebound law against female membership and with a deep detestation of all freelance pilferers.”

— Fritz Leiber

49. “There’s a taint in the fog tonight,” he announced. The Mouser said dryly, “I already smell dead fish, burnt fat, horse dung, tickly lint, Lankhmar sausage gone stale, cheap temple incense burnt by the ten-pound cake, rancid oil, moldy grain, slaves’ barracks, embalmers’ tanks crowded to the black brim, and the stink of a cathedral full of unwashed carters and trulls celebrating orgiastic rites – and now you tell me of a taint!”

— Fritz Leiber

50. “And the entire world was just as bad; it was perishing of pollution, drowning and suffocating in chemical and atomic poisons, detergents and insecticides, industrial effluvia, smog, the stench of sulfuric acid, the quantities of steel, cement, aluminum ever bright, eternal plastics, omnipresent paper, gas and electron floods – electro-mephitic city-stuff indeed!”

— Fritz Leiber