…the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side barely has the upper hand. That’s where you’ll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

…people tend to act the way you treat them, so if you treat them like children or prisoners, don’t be surprised when that’s how they behave.

— Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, and Hyrum Wright, Software Engineering at Google

A dissenter could indeed refuse to do work that might end up in the hands of soldiers: that would mean, in effect, not being a computer engineer.

— Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine

To find salvation in God, or in whatever figure of transcendence one might wish to put in his place, means to ‘declare war on life, on nature, on the will to live!

— Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought

Ministry of Defense is more respectable than Ministry of War. It implies we’re reacting to aggression whenever we engage in combat.

— Ali Almossawi and Alejandro Giraldo, An Illustrated Book of Loaded Language