Tom

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“You should not desire, he knows, the death of any human creature. Death is your prince, you are not his patron; when you think he is engaged somewhere, he will batter down your door, walks in and wipes his boots on you.”
― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

“(Somalia) was a watershed," said one State Department official, "The idea used to be that terrible countries were terrible because good, decent, innocent people were being oppressed by evil, thuggish leaders. Somalia changed that. Here you have a country where just about everybody is caught up in hatred and fighting. You stop an old lady on the street and ask her if she wants peace, and she’ll say, yes, of course, I pray for it daily. All the things you’d expect her to say. Then ask her if she would be willing for her clan to share power with another in order to have that peace, and she’ll say, 'With those murderers and thieves? I’d die first.' People in these countries - Bosnia is a more recent example - don’t want peace. They want victory. They want power. Men, women, old and young. Somalia was the experience that taught us that people in these places bear much of the responsibility for things being the way they are. The hatred and the killing continues because they want it to. Or because they don’t want peace enough to stop it." (pg 334-335)”
― Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

“In 2081, the individual human in war will no longer be the hero of romantic history, but only a shivering, naked hostage to fortune: a victim. The research that first develops human-level robots, whether or not they are furnished with bodies in human shape, will be funded primarily by the military. As we already see in the development of cruise missiles, human warriors are being replaced by machines. Ultimately the glamorous figure of the wartime fighter-pilot will give way to the robot: able to withstand thousands of gravities of acceleration while the human can withstand only ten; needing no complicated life-support system; far tougher than fragile human flesh in surviving radiation; knowing no fatigue; never subject to doubt, despair, or pangs of conscience; merciless.”
― Gerald K. O'Neill