This senseless advance of expensively trained and equipped men to certain and complete slaughter—men who as usual not only had no idea of what they w… - James Blish

The Venetians had never been more than formally and outwardly allegiant to the Church from at least their second treaty with Islam in the mid-fifteenth century. The highest pinnacle of their ethics was that of dealing fairly with each other, and since there was at the same time no sweeter music to Venetian ears than the scream of outrage from the outsider who had discovered too late that he had been cheated, this left them little that they felt they ought to say in the confessional. Most of them seem to regard the now obvious downfall of almost all of human civilization as a plot to divert the tourist trade to some other town—probably Istanbul, which they still referred to as Constantinople.

“Look at it this way for a moment, Dr. Ware. Very roughly, there are only two general kinds of men who go into the munitions business—those without consciences, who see the business as an avenue to a great fortune, eventually to be used for something else, like Jack here—and of course there’s a subclass of those, people who do have consciences but can’t resist the money anyhow, or the knowledge, rather like Dr. Hess.”
Both men stirred, but apparently both decided not to dispute their portraits.
“The second kind is made up of people like me—people who actually take pleasure in the controlled production of chaos and destruction. Not sadists primarily, except in the sense that every dedicated artist is something of a sadist, willing to countenance a little or a lot of suffering—not only his own, but other people’s—for the sake of the end product.”
“A familiar type, to be sure,” Ware said with a lopsided grin. “I think it was the saintly Robert Frost who said that a painting by Whistler was worth any number of old ladies.”
“Engineers are like this too,” Baines said.

The tribesmen understand this very well, although they would not describe it in the same terms I have. It is simply a working part of their lives. Do you think they would continue to consult me if they found that the advice that I gave them did not work? They are uncivilized, but they are not insane.