Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Only professional diplomats, inveterate idiots and women view diplomacy as a long-term substitute for war.”

— David Mitchell

102. “The her that lived in her looked out through her eyes, through my eyes, and at the me that lives in me.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

105. “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

106. “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

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

— David Mitchell

108. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

111. “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

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

— David Mitchell

113. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

118. “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

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

— David Mitchell

120. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

123. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

126. “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

127. “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

128. “Do ants get headaches?”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

130. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

137. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

140. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

144. “There are so many cities in every single city.”

— David Mitchell

145. “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

146. “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

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

— David Mitchell

148. “As long as you can Houdini your way out of the Sisyphean constraints then originality happens.”

— David Mitchell

149. “I think words operate like musical notes that the eyeball hears.”

— David Mitchell

150. “Historically, unfortunately, race seems to be the major division that humanity has imposed on itself, a way of subdividing into smaller groups.”

— David Mitchell