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“The opportunity for evil in itself does not suffice; people need a rationale as well. Consider how unpleasant, how awkward it must be when your neighbor, catching his breath (and that can happen anytime), screams, 'Why?' - or, 'Aren't you ashamed?!' It's embarrassing to stand there without a ready answer. A crowbar makes a poor rebuttal, everybody senses that. The whole trick lies in having the proper grounds to brush aside such aggravating objections. Contemptuously. Everyone wants to commit a villainy without having to feel like a villain.”
― Stanisław Lem, The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy

“The economically uneducated tend to view wealth as a zero sum game by which one can only be wealthy from taking from someone else's and one is poor since someone took theirs'. Thus, it follows that the richer region in the world, Europe is rich since it exploited the poorest, Africa. They fail to understand that immense poverty is the natural state of man. In reality, Europe is rich and Africa is not since geographic and historical factors incentivized Europe to create institutions that created wealth, which never occured in Africa. Africa and Europe are rich and poor for reasons that have little to do with the other.”
― Anonymous

“And of course she had studied the civilization that had immediately preceded her own - the civilization that had mistaken the functions of the system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people. Those funny old days, when men went for change of air instead of changing the air in their rooms!”
― E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops

“Take a community of Dutchmen of the type of those who defended themselves for fifty years against all the power of Spain at a time when Spain was the greatest power in the World. Intermix with them a strain of those inflexible French Huguenots who gave up home and fortune and left their Country forever at the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The product must obviously be one of the most rugged, virile, unconquerable races ever seen upon Earth. Take this formidable people and train them for seven generations in constant warfare against savage men and ferocious beasts, in circumstances under which no weakling could survive, place them so that they acquire exceptional skills with weapons and in horsemanship, give them a Country which is eminently suited to the tactics of the huntsman, the marksman and the rider. Then, finally, put a fine temper upon their military qualities by a dour fatalistic Old Testament religion and an ardent and consuming patriotism. Combine all of these qualities and all these impulses in one individual, and you have the modern Boer. The most formidable antagonist who ever crossed the path of Imperial Britain.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Great Boer War