War & Peace Quote by Dougray Scott

War, in Dougray Scott's telling, isn’t just tragedy; it’s a narrative breakdown. The warning "be careful what you wish for" is familiar, almost folksy, but he sharpens it by aiming it at the political fantasy that conflict can be clean, purposeful, and controllable. The real danger isn’t only violence. It’s the way a cause gets laundered into slogans, then traded between people who need it to mean something else.

The line "reasons for war get confused" does quiet work. It frames war as a kind of social fog machine: once the first shots are fired, motive becomes a group project. Scott’s phrasing is deliberately plain, actorly in the best sense - accessible enough to feel like lived experience rather than policy debate. He’s pointing at the gap between intention and outcome, where idealism is easy to recruit and hard to police.

"One person can be very clear in their motives, but others can have different agendas" is the core of the subtext: even if you believe you’re fighting for liberation, security, justice, someone else is fighting for territory, revenge, profit, domestic approval, or career advancement. That’s not cynicism for its own sake; it’s a reminder that war is coalition-building under extreme pressure, and coalitions are messy.

Contextually, coming from a contemporary actor whose career brushes up against war stories on screen, it reads as a caution against the seductive simplicity of war plots - the comforting idea that there’s a protagonist with a pure goal. Scott insists the cast is bigger than that, and the script keeps getting rewritten.