“There is no meaning in fighting a war unless one can end it in victory.”
Patrick Zala Quotes
2 quotes from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“Of course it will! When the very last Natural is dead, this war will end!”
Athrun has asked his father whether meeting power with more power will ever end the war, and this is the answer, given in his office, before he has his son shot and arrested. The scene is short and there is no music cue to tell the audience it is the point of no return. The story had to build two things for the sentence to land. It needed Athrun to arrive still hoping his father meant something else, which is why he flies to the PLANTs unordered, and it needed the viewer to have heard Patrick say something almost identical in episode twenty and let it pass. Both are in place, so the line functions as a confirmation rather than a twist. What follows is GENESIS, and the series is honest that the weapon was always this sentence with hardware attached.
Read Patrick Zala's story from the start
Every line above is a fragment. The manga is where the fragments come from, and the print edition is the one this site checks its quotes against.
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Patrick Zala says this in the PLANT Supreme Council, in the process of taking the chairmanship from Siegel Clyne, and it is his whole political program in one sentence. The series gives the line a context that most quote sites strip: the debate is about whether to negotiate, and Clyne's faction is arguing that a war between Earth and the colonies cannot be won in any sense that leaves either side standing. Zala's reply is not madness yet. It is the ordinary logic of a man whose wife died at Junius Seven, and the show lets it sound reasonable for twenty more episodes before he finishes the thought aloud in episode forty-two: victory means every Natural dead. Gundam villains usually reveal themselves. Zala is the rarer case of a politician whose first speech already contained the last one, if anybody had been listening.