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1 " A thug. In peacetime Fitch would be hanging around a pool table giving the cops trouble. He was perfect for war. Tibbets had chosen his men well - most of them, anyway. Moving back past Haddock January stopped to stare at the group of men in the navigation cabin. They joked, drank coffee. They were all a bit like Fitch: young toughs, capable and thoughtless. They're having a good time, an adventure. That was January's dominant impression of his companions in the 509th; despite all the bitching and the occasional moments of overmastering fear, they were having a good time. His mind spun forward and he saw what these young men would grow up to be like as clearly as if they stood before him in businessmen's suits, prosperous and balding. They would be tough and capable and thoughtless, and as the years passed and the great war receded in time they would look back on it with ever-increasing nostalgia, for they would be the survivors and not the dead. Every year of this war would feel like ten in their memories, so that the war would always remain the central experience of their lives - a time when history lay palpable in their hands, when each of their daily acts affected it, when moral issues were simple, and others told them what to do - so that as more years passed and the survivors aged, bodies falling apart, lives in one rut or another, they would unconsciously push harder and harder to thrust the world into war again, thinking somewhere inside themselves that if they could only return to world war then they would magically be again as they were in the last one - young, and free, and happy. And by that time they would hold the positions of power, they would be capable of doing it. "
― Kim Stanley Robinson , The Lucky Strike
2 " Scientific advancement carries risk,” Kohler argued. “It always has. Space programs, genetic research, medicine—they all make mistakes. Science needs to survive its own blunders, at any cost. For everyone’s sake.”Vittoria was amazed at Kohler’s ability to weigh moral issues with scientific detachment. His intellect seemed to be the product of an icy divorce from his inner spirit. “You think CERN is so critical to the earth’s future that we should be immune from moral responsibility? "
― Dan Brown , Angels & Demons (Robert Langdon, #1)
3 " ...sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia. "
― Yevgeny Zamyatin , Islanders and The Fisher of Men
4 " If we reject, as we must, the doctrine that the majority is always right, to submit moral issues to the vote is to gamble that what we believe to be right will come out of the ballot with more votes behind it than what we believe to be wrong; and that is a gamble we will often lose. "
― Peter Singer
5 " It is easy and dismally enervating to think of opposition as merely perverse or actually evil-far more invigorating to see it as essential for honing the mind and as a positive good in itself. For the day that moral issues cease to be fought over is the day the word " human" disappears from the race. "