Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Don’t bemoan your misspent life quite yet. Forgive me for flaunting my experience, but you have no conception of what a misspent life constitutes.”

— David Mitchell

102. “Perpetual encagement endows any mirage of salvation with credibility.”

— David Mitchell

103. “Yo! Amaba! A! Ese! Jodido! Perro!”

— David Mitchell

104. “Memories are their own descendents masquerading as the ancestors of the present.”

— David Mitchell

105. “Whoever opined “Money can’t buy you happiness” obviously had far too much of the stuff.”

— David Mitchell

106. “Only professional diplomats, inveterate idiots and women view diplomacy as a long-term substitute for war.”

— David Mitchell

107. “Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman.”

— David Mitchell

108. “I’m from a time and place where bigheadedness was a really savage crime, and you’d get cut down for it by your peers and parents.”

— David Mitchell

109. “Science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity’s powers of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilisation drives itself to extinction.”

— David Mitchell

110. “Me, I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right.”

— David Mitchell

111. “Anticipating the end of the world is humanity’s oldest passtime.”

— David Mitchell

112. “The most malicious god is the god of the counted chicken.”

— David Mitchell

113. “War’s an auction where whoever can pay the most in damage and still be standing wins.”

— David Mitchell

114. “Any society’s upper-crust is riddled with immorality, how else d’you think they keep their power? Reputation is king of the public sphere, not private. It is dethroned by public acts.”

— David Mitchell

115. “Men invented money Women invented mutual aid.”

— David Mitchell

116. “Creation never ceased on the sixth evening, it occurs to the young man. Creation unfolds around us, despite us and through us at the speed of days and nights. And we call it love.”

— David Mitchell

117. “A life can get knocked into a new orbit by a car crash, a lottery win or just a bleary-eyed consultant giving bad news in a calm voice.”

— David Mitchell

118. “Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people’s women who pay the most.”

— David Mitchell

119. “Under the Enrichment Laws, consumers have to spend a fixed quota of dollars each month, depending on their strata. Hoarding is an anti-corpocratic crime.”

— David Mitchell

120. “Once any tyranny becomes accepted as ordinary, its victory is assured.”

— David Mitchell

121. “It’s true, reading too many novels makes you go blind.”

— David Mitchell

122. “If I want to act relaxed, it’s going to take all my cunning, skill and concentration.”

— David Mitchell

123. “Any adaptation is a translation, and there is such a thing as an unreadably faithful translation; and I believe a degree of reinterpretatio n for the new language may be not only inevitable but desirable.”

— David Mitchell

124. “Music’s a wood you walk through.”

— David Mitchell

125. “All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities.”

— David Mitchell

126. “The earth’s a door, if you press your ear against it.”

— David Mitchell

127. “I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called ‘global literature’ is going.”

— David Mitchell

128. “The best way to get out of debt is not to seek to get out of debt, but to seek to create wealth.”

— David Mitchell

129. “History admits no rules; only outcomes.”

— David Mitchell

130. “Your turn has come to sift through the dreck of humanity for rare specks of originality.”

— David Mitchell

131. “Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I’ve stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again.”

— David Mitchell

132. “A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living.”

— David Mitchell

133. “Do ants get headaches?”

— David Mitchell

134. “Lying’s wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.”

— David Mitchell

135. “The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.”

— David Mitchell

136. “Love’s pure free joy when it works, but when it goes bad you pay for the good hours at loan-shark prices.”

— David Mitchell

137. “Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting.”

— David Mitchell

138. “Taro taught me that people respect spirit, but even cowards don’t respect cowards.”

— David Mitchell

139. “I’m not a great deep political thinker.”

— David Mitchell

140. “Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one’s core.”

— David Mitchell

141. “I’m not from a milieu where high-register language or philosophical ideas were welcome.”

— David Mitchell

142. “Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword.”

— David Mitchell

143. “It’s true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction.”

— David Mitchell

144. “The healthy can’t understand the emptied, the broken.”

— David Mitchell

145. “What do I miss? Second-hand bookshops where I can find things I had no idea I wanted. AbeBooks helps, but it doesn’t have that smell.”

— David Mitchell

146. “I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. Diagonal People.”

— David Mitchell

147. “People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it’ll no longer function.”

— David Mitchell

148. “An idler and a sluggard are as different as a gourmand and a glutton.”

— David Mitchell

149. “I love HBO productions, actually, like ‘The Wire.’”

— David Mitchell

150. “Courage is the highest quality for a soldier, but technology is a fine substitute.”

— David Mitchell