Edgar Rice Burroughs

As you know I am not of Barsoom; your ways are not my ways, and I can only act in the future as I have in the past, in accordance with the dictates of my conscience and guided by the standards of mine own people.

I shall have to believe even though I cannot understand.

If there be a fate that is sometimes cruel to me, there surely is a kind and merciful Providence which watches over me.

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.

When Tarzan killed he more often smiled than scowled, and smiles are the foundation of beauty.

You are here for but an instant, and you mustn't take yourself too seriously

...smiles are the foundation of beauty.

A warrior may change his metal, but not his heart.

Imagine, if you can, a huge grizzly with ten legs armed with mighty talons and an enormous froglike mouth splitting his head from ear to ear, exposing three rows of long, white tusks. Then endow this creature of your imagination with the agility and ferocity of a half-starved Bengal tiger and the strength of a span of bulls, and you will have some faint conception of Woola in action.

If I had followed my better judgment always, my life would have been a very dull one.

I do not believe that I am made of the stuff which constitutes heroes, because, in all of the hundreds of instances that my voluntary acts have placed me face to face with death, I cannot recall a single one where any alternative step to that I took occurred to me until many hours later. My mind is evidently so constituted that I am subconsciously forced into the path of duty without recourse to tiresome mental processes. However that may be, I have never regretted that cowardice is not optional with me.

...those features are burned so deep into my memory and my heart that I should recognize them anywhere in the world from among a thousand others, who might appear identical to any one but me.

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.

It is a characteristic of the weak and criminal to attribute to others the misfortunes that are the result of their own wickedness.

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.