Top 140 Robert E. Howard Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “You can not escape me!” he roared. “Lead me into a trap and I’ll pile the heads of your kinsmen at your feet. Hide from me and I’ll tear apart the mountains to find you! I’ll follow you to hell and beyond hell!”

— Robert E. Howard

52. “I don’t believe I ever saw an Oklahoman who wouldn’t fight at the drop of a hat – and frequently drop the hat himself.”

— Robert E. Howard

53. “I never saw a man fight as Conan fought. He put his back to the courtyard wall, and before they overpowered him the dead men were strewn in heaps thigh-deep about him. But at last they dragged him down, a hundred against one.”

— Robert E. Howard

54. “But folk who have tasted of death are only partly alive. In the dark corners of their souls and minds, death still lurks unconquered.”

— Robert E. Howard

55. “Over shadowy spires and gleaming towers lay the ghostly darkness and silence that runs before dawn.”

— Robert E. Howard

56. “Did you deem yourself strong because you were able to twist the heads off civilised folk, poor weaklings with muscles like rotten string? Hell! Break the neck of a wild Cimmerian bull before you call yourself strong.”

— Robert E. Howard

57. “Damned be the dark ends of the earth where old horrors live again.”

— Robert E. Howard

58. “Break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.”

— Robert E. Howard

59. “There is always a way, if the desire be coupled with courage,” answered the Cimmerian.”

— Robert E. Howard

60. “I’ll say one thing about an oil boom; it will teach a kid that Life’s a pretty rotten thing as quick as anything I can think of.”

— Robert E. Howard

61. “I have known many gods. He who denies them is blind as he who trusts them too deeply.”

— Robert E. Howard

62. “One man’s bane is another’s bliss.”

— Robert E. Howard

63. “I see in the papers where Roy Guthrie committed suicide. Why, I wonder?”

— Robert E. Howard

64. “Any but the most brutish of men must be touched with a certain awe or wonder at the baring of a woman’s naked soul.”

— Robert E. Howard

65. “A pantherish twist and shift of his body avoided the blundering rush of two yellow swordsmen, and the blade of one missing its objective, was sheathed in the breast of the other. A.”

— Robert E. Howard

66. “When the oceans drown the world, women will take time for jealousy.”

— Robert E. Howard

67. “I am Solomon Kane.” The voice was resonant and powerful. “Are you prepared to meet your God?” “Why, Monsieur,” Le Loup answered, bowing, “I assure you I am as ready as I ever will be. I might ask Monsieur the same question.” “No doubt I stated my inquiry wrongly,” Kane said grimly. “I will change it: Are you prepared to meet your master, the Devil?”

— Robert E. Howard

68. “A kingdom is not lost by a single defeat.”

— Robert E. Howard

69. “It is an ill thing to meet a man you thought dead in the woodland at dusk.”

— Robert E. Howard

70. “They take little interest in waking life, choosing to lie most of the time in death-like sleep.” “Then.”

— Robert E. Howard

71. “It was no ape, neither was it a man. It was some shambling horror spawned in the mysterious, nameless jungles of the south, where strange life teemed in the reeking rot without the dominance of man, and drums thundered in temples that had never known the tread of a human foot.”

— Robert E. Howard

72. “What do I know of cultured ways, the gilt, the craft and the lie?”

— Robert E. Howard

73. “He was like a tiger among baboons as he leaped, side-stepped and spun, offering an ever-moving target, while his ax wove a shining wheel of death about him. For.”

— Robert E. Howard

74. “Civilization is a natural and inevitable consequence – whether good or evil I am not prepared to state.”

— Robert E. Howard

75. “If I was wealthy I’d never do anything but poke around in ruined cities all over the world – and probably get snake-bit.”

— Robert E. Howard

76. “The moon rose, striking fire from the Cimmerian’s horned helmet. No call awoke the echoes; yet suddenly the night grew tense and the jungle held its breath. Instinctively Conan loosened the great sword in its sheath.”

— Robert E. Howard

77. “Coming, as I do, from mountain folk on one side and sea followers on the other, there are few old songs of the hills or the sea with which I am not familiar.”

— Robert E. Howard

78. “They trapped the Lion on Shamu’s plain; They weighted his limbs with an iron chain; They cried aloud in the trumpet-blast, They cried, “The lion is caged at last!” Woe to the Cities of river and plain If ever the Lion stalks again! – Old Ballad.”

— Robert E. Howard

79. “It was made from the black lotus, whose blossoms wave in the lost jungles of Khitai, where only the yellow-skulled priests of Yun dwell. Those blossoms strike dead any who smell of them.”

— Robert E. Howard

80. “How did you come to your crown, you and that black-faced pig beside you? Your fathers did the fighting and the suffering, and handed their crowns to you on golden platters. What you inherited without lifting a finger – except to poison a few brothers – I fought for. “You.”

— Robert E. Howard

81. “I became a writer in spite of my environments.”

— Robert E. Howard

82. “Civilization is a network and a maze of precedences and custom.”

— Robert E. Howard

83. “I reckon if I ever marry, she will have to be a strong woman in a circus or something.”

— Robert E. Howard

Featured in: Strong Quotes

84. “Rome got some peachy pastings when she tried to lick the Irish.”

— Robert E. Howard

85. “Men spoke of tribal war, of a gathering of vultures in the southeast, and a terrible leader who led his swiftly increasing hordes to victory.”

— Robert E. Howard

86. “He saw no particular humor in it, and was too new to civilization to understand its discourtesies. Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing. He was bewildered and chagrined, and doubtless would have slunk away, abashed, but the Kothian chose.”

— Robert E. Howard

87. “Every twinge of sensation, even of agony, was a negation of death.”

— Robert E. Howard

88. “A woman in such an emotional tempest is as perilous as a blind cobra to any about her.”

— Robert E. Howard

89. “They realize their ultimate doom, but they are fatalists, incapable of resistance or escape. Not one of the present generation has been out of sight of these walls.”

— Robert E. Howard

90. “I have come to believe that mankind eternally hovers on the brinks of secret oceans of which it knows nothing.”

— Robert E. Howard

91. “We’re making tin gods out of those poor buffoons in Hollywood; I dote on movies and appreciate the scanty art therein but I consider the profession about the most debased and debasing I know.”

— Robert E. Howard

92. “But whatever my failure, I have this thing to remember – that I was a pioneer in my profession, just as my grandfathers were in theirs, in that I was the first man in this section to earn his living as a writer.”

— Robert E. Howard

93. “You black dog!” A red mist of fury swept across Conan’s eyes. “Were I free I’d give you a broken back!”

— Robert E. Howard

94. “But the idea of a man making his living by writing seemed, in that hardy environment, so fantastic that even today I am sometimes myself assailed by a feeling of unreality.”

— Robert E. Howard

95. “When you allow the elevation of a man, one can be sure that you’ll profit by his advancement.”

— Robert E. Howard

96. “It is not pleasant to come upon Death in a lonely place at midnight.”

— Robert E. Howard

97. “What always was must always be.”

— Robert E. Howard

98. “I have put off the past like a worn-out cloak.”

— Robert E. Howard

99. “The poem you sent me was as fiery and virile as anything you’ve ever written – or anybody else, for that matter. Especially the second part went to my brain like the flaming liquor of insanity. No one else besides Jack London has the power to move me just that way.”

— Robert E. Howard

100. “Again the governor knelt, for part of his wisdom was the knowledge that a woman in such an emotional tempest is as perilous as a blind cobra to any about her.”

— Robert E. Howard