Civilization is a network and a maze of precedences and custom. — Robert E. Howard

Civilization is a natural and inevitable consequence–whether good or evil I am not prepared to state. — Robert E. Howard

The more I see of what you call civilization, the more highly I think of what you call savagery! — Robert E. Howard

Break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red–handed. — Robert E. Howard

I reckon if I ever marry, she will have to be a strong woman in a circus or something. — Robert E. Howard

One man’s bane is another’s bliss. — Robert E. Howard

It is an ill thing to meet a man you thought dead in the woodland at dusk. — Robert E. Howard

A kingdom is not lost by a single defeat. — Robert E. Howard

I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, & am content. — Robert E. Howard

I have put off the past like a worn–out cloak. — Robert E. Howard

I have not been a success, and probably never will be. — Robert E. Howard

My body seems a mere encumbrance to me; an imbecillic wagon, hitched to the horse of desire, which is the soul. — Robert E. Howard

The people among which I lived–and yet live, mainly–made their living from cotton, wheat, cattle, oil, with the usual percentage of business men and professional men. — Robert E. Howard

I have no fear of the Hereafter. An orthodox hell could hardly be more torture than my life has been. — Robert E. Howard

Life is but a web spun of ghosts and dreams and illusions. — Robert E. Howard

Don’t you think that as a people, Americans have less poetry, real poetry, in their souls than any other nations? — Robert E. Howard

What shall a man say when a friend has vanished behind the doors of Death? A mere tangle of barren words, only words. — Robert E. Howard

It is not pleasant to come upon Death in a lonely place at midnight. — Robert E. Howard

I became a writer in spite of my environments. — Robert E. Howard

In the old free days all I wanted was a sharp sword and a straight path to my enemies. Now no paths are straight and my sword is useless. — Robert E. Howard

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

A woman in such an emotional tempest is as perilous as a blind cobra to any about her. — Robert E. Howard

Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen. — Robert E. Howard

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

The only safe enemy was a headless enemy. — Robert E. Howard

Aye, you white dog, you are like all your race; but to a black man gold can never pay for blood. — Robert E. Howard

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

I have known many gods. He who denies them is blind as he who trusts them too deeply. — Robert E. Howard

I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content. — Robert E. Howard

While we may open the books of the past, we may but grant flying glances of the future, through the mist that veils it. — Robert E. Howard

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

What is death but a traversing of eternities and a crossing of cosmic oceans? — Robert E. Howard