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He says, “No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They’re not affordable things. No prince ever says, ‘This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.’ You enter into one and it uses up all the money you’ve got, and then it breaks you and bankrupts you.”

— Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall (2009)

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War

More quotes by Hilary Mantel

He will remember his first sight of the open sea: a gray wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream.

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It is a sure sign of troubled minds, the habit of quotation.

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A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old.

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Lent saps the spirits, as of course it is designed to do.

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Gambling is not a vice, if you can afford to do it.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Hilary Mantel (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.