Moral Injury Quotes

“As beasts are beneath human restraints, gods are above them... It would be foolish and untruthful to deny the appeal of exalted, godlike intoxication....We have seen the paradox that these godlike exalted moments often correspond to times when the men who have survived them say that they have acted like beasts....Above all, a sense of merely human virtue, a sense of being valued and of valuing anything seems to have fled their lives....However, all of our virtues come from not being gods. Generosity is meaningless to a god, who never suffers shortage or want. Courage is meaningless to a god, who is immortal and can never suffer permanent injury. The godlike berserk state can destroy the capacity for virtue. Whether the berserker is beneath humanity as an animal, above it as a god, or both, he is cut off from all human community when he is in this state.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“We could only control India through force of arms, but force was useless against a people who didn’t fight back; because you couldn’t kill people like that without killing a part of yourself too.”
― Abir Mukherjee, Smoke and Ashes

“You throw the lever or don’t, hit one person with the trolley or let five other innocents die, and maybe that’s murder, and maybe that’s something that’s going to stay on your conscience or stain your soul for all eternity. But someone put you there, alone and helpless, in front of the lever. Someone set you up, someone tied those people to the tracks.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division