“Anger and hate against one we love steels our hearts, but contempt or pity leaves us silent and ashamed.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“Love is a strange master, and human nature is still stranger.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“It never seems to occur to some people, that, like beauty, a sense of humor may sometimes be fatal.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“Captain Billings,” he drawled finally, “if you will pardon my candor, I might remark that you are something of an ass, don’t you know.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“I should at least die as I had lived—fighting.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“You didn’t find any trace of her?” asked d’Arnot. // Tarzan shook his head. “None. In the jungle, I could have found her; but here –-here, in civilization, a man cannot even find himself.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“p 18 – Hundreds of thousands of years ago our ancestors of the dim and distant past faced the same problems which we must face in the same primeval forest. That we are here today evidences their victory.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“P44- in tarzans clever little mind many thoughts revolved and back of these was his divine power of reason.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“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
“But the wireless,” asked Momulla. “What has the wireless to do with our remaining here?” “Oh yes,” replied Gust, scratching his head. He was wondering if the Maori were really so ignorant as to believe the preposterous lie he was about to unload upon him. “Oh yes! You see every warship is equipped with what they call a wireless apparatus. It lets them talk to other ships hundreds of miles away, and it lets them listen to all that is said on these other ships.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“Even brave men, and D’Arnot was a brave man, are sometimes frightened by solitude.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“There was one slight, desperate chance, and that I decided I must take–it was for Dejah Thoris, and no man has lived who would not risk a thousand deaths for such as she.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“Mine own people do not care for me, John Carter; I am too unlike them. It is a sad fate, since I must live my life amongst them.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“If I sometimes seem to take too great pride in my fighting ability, it must be remembered that fighting is my vocation.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“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
“Teach me to speak the language of men.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“I have discovered that the world over, unusual weather prevails at all times of the year.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“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
“Tut, tut! I have often admonished my pupils to count ten before speaking. Were I you, Mr. Philander, I should count at least a thousand, and then maintain a discreet silence.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“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
“Twenty years have intervened; for ten of them I lived and fought for Dejah Thoris and her people, and for ten I have lived upon her memory.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“We are between the wild thoat of certainty and the mad zitidar of fact.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“As a mistress, death seemed lacking in many essentials. Therefore, I decided not to die.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“What are you Tarzan?” he asked aloud. “An ape or a man? If you are an ape, you will do as the apes do – leave one of your kind in the jungle to die if it suited your whim to go elsewhere.If you are a man, you will return to protect your kind. You will not run away from one of your own people, because one has run away from you.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“They say that none of us exists, except in the imagination of his fellows, other than as an intangible, invisible mentality.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“To lose the only creature in all his world who ever had manifested love and affection for him was the greatest tragedy he had ever known.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“He longed for the little cabin and the sun-kissed sea – for the cool interior of the well-built house, and for the never-ending wonders of the many books.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“The whole fabric of our religion is based on superstitious belief in lies that have been foisted upon us for ages by those directly above us, to whose personal profit and aggrandizement it was to have us continue to believe as they wished us to believe.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“I am glad,” he said, “that I do not dwell in your country among such savage peoples. Here, in Caspak, men fight with men when they meet – men of different races – but their weapons are first for the slaying of beasts in the chase and defense. We do not fashion weapons solely for the killing of man as do your peoples. Your country must indeed be a savage country, from which you are fortunate to have escaped to the peace and security of Caspak.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“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