David Mitchell
David Mitchell
English stand up comedian and half of the comedy duo Mitchell and Webb, alongside Robert Webb. He is best known for starring in and writing the Channel 4 series Peep Show, for which he won the British Academy Television Award for Best Comedy Performance in 2009. He has also written and starred in several sketch shows including The Mitchell and Webb Situation, That Mitchell and Webb Sound and, That Mitchell and Webb Look.
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionComedian
Date of Birth14 July 1974
CitySalisbury, England
David Mitchell quotes about
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.
Oh, diplomacy ... it mops up war's spillages; legitimizes its outcomes; gives the strong state the means to impose its will on a weaker one, while saving its fleets and battalions for weightier opponents.
Wars are never cured, they just go into remission for a few years.
War's an auction where whoever can pay the most in damage and still be standing wins.
War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery.
Only professional diplomats, inveterate idiots and women view diplomacy as a long-term substitute for war.
If war's first victim is truth, its second is clerical efficiency.
Wars do not combust without warning. They begin as little fires over the horizon. Wars approach. A wise man watches for the smoke, and prepares to vacate the neighborhood, just like Ayrs and Jocasta. My worry is that the next war will be so big, nowhere with a decent restaurant will be left untouched.
What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions and the borders of states. Listen to this and remember it. The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be.
Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience.
Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword.
Write something every single day, even if it's just three lines. And it doesn't matter if it's any good - just write something every day.
The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making. But who says the world has to make sense?
Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still are.