David Mitchell Quotes

It is not only the living who are killed in war.

There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.

War is a dangerous teacher and physical victory leads often to a moral defeat.

If in the modern world wars have unfortunately to be fought (and they do, it seems) then they must be stopped at the first possible moment, otherwise they corrupt us, they create new problems and make our future even more uncertain. That is more than morality; it's sense.

It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.

If war is glorified, it tends to eclipse the policies it is meant to serve.

The only compensation which war offers for its manifold mischiefs, is in the great personal qualities to which it gives scope and occasion.

It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.

War in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.

Wars always bring about a conservative reaction. They overwhelm and destroy patient and careful efforts to improve the condition of man.

Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.

In modern war there is no such thing as victor and vanquished... There is only a loser, and the loser is mankind.

We learned some bad things, and the Vietnam War led to some bad conclusions. We're not the greatest generation, that's for sure.

To win a war is as disasterous as to lose one.

War that hasn't affected us here, in the way that you would imagine a five-year war would affect a country.

Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth by falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages. A peace will equally leave the warrior and the relater of wars destitute of employment; and I know not whether more is to be dreaded from streets filled with soldiers accustomed to plunder, or from garrets filled with scribblers accustomed to lie.

It is always easy to begin a war, but very difficult to stop one.

The inhabitants of territories, often the theatre of war, are unavoidably subject to frequent infringements on their rights, which serve to weaken their sense of those rights; and by degrees, the people are brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors but as their superiors.

There is no more cruel illusion than that war makes a people richer.

If things do get better in Iraq, I'm saying as someone who thinks the war was a mistake. I'm saying that is cause for us all to have a huge party. It's a big deal if things get better. Because if they don't get better, our country is going to be hurt for generations.

War will of itself discover and lay open the hidden and rankling wounds of the victorious party.

Every war, when viewed from the undistorted perspective of life’s sanctity, is a “civil war” waged by humanity against itself.

The king who makes war on his enemies tenderly distresses his subjects most cruelly.

I really wanted to make a nonpolitical political film. I wanted something that folks in red states and blue states could look at and not ask if this is the right thing to do to be in this war, but what this war is doing to the fabric of our society.

Before this war is over,' [Walter] said - or something said through his lips - 'every man and woman and child in Canada will feel it - you, Mary, will feel it - feel it to your heart's core. You will weep tears of blood over it. The Piper has come - and he will pipe until every corner of the world has heard his awful and irresistible music. It will be years before the dance of death is over - years, Mary. And in those years millions of hearts will break.