David Mitchell Quotes

Wars almost never end the way starters had in mind.

War is just like bush-clearing-the moment you stop, the jungle comes back even thicker, but for a little while you can plant and grow a crop in the ground you have won at such a terrible cost.

Every war carries within it the war which will answer it. Every war is answered by a new war, until everything, everything is smashed.

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

All wars come to an end, at least temporarily. But the authority acquired by the state hangs on; political power never abdicates.

The thing that really gets to me is that countries are in the news only when things get out of hand. That's when it's newsworthy. When the war ends, it's not newsworthy anymore; no one wants to think about it. Actually, the aftermath is the most important part. It's when people have to rebuild.

Almost every great war has led to a collapse of the coalition that won the victory.

Battles are never the end of war; for the dead must be buried and the cost of the conflict must be paid.

When a war is won, it's the losers, not the winners, who are liberated.

How then to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by education. If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war than war itself? What tremendous feat of dialectic could carry with it a tenth the power of a single gutted ship with its ghastly cargo?

Wars do not end wars any more than an extraordinarily large conflagration does away with the fire hazard.

Mark! Where his carnage and his conquests cease, He makes a solitude and calls it-peace!

If you ever see a war," she says, not looking up from her clipboard, "you'll learn that war only destroys. No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors.

Well the planet I've got a chance to visit is Earth, and Earth's principal features are chaos and war. I think I'd be a fool to spend years here and never have a look.

Our modern wars make many unhappy while they last and none happy when they are over.

It is always easy enough to take up arms, but very difficult to lay them down; the commencement and the termination of war are notnecessarily in the same hands; even a coward may begin, but the end comes only when the victors are willing.

They won the war but lost the peace.

The evils of war are great in their endurance, and have a long reckoning for ages to come.

I write in the novel's afterword that our recent wars "finish not with victory or defeat but with a calendar draw-down date and a presumption that we shall never be reconciled with the enemy".

... a war always ends.

War is just what we do. Yet, of course, the effects of it are repeatedly deeper, then deeper, then deeper.

The questions which for years were in dispute between the State and General Government, and which unhappily were not decided by the dictates of reason, but referred to the decision of war, having been decided against us, it is the part of wisdom to acquiesce in the result, and of candor to recognize the fact.

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

We have to get tough with the Russians. They don't know how to behave. They are like bulls in a china shop. They are only 25 years old. We are over 100 and the British are centuries older. We have got to teach them how to behave.

Those who start wars, never fight them, And those who fight wars, they never like them...