There was some thing almost sublimely elegant, Sal thought, about how perfect a waste of time, people, resources and hard work the whole project had … - Iain Banks

Such a stupid act. Sometimes heroics revolted him; they seemed like an insult to the soldier who weighed the risks of the situation and made calm, cunning decisions based on experience and imagination, the sort of unshowy soldiering that didn’t win medals but wars.

The avatar laughed, raised his eyebrows at her. “Golly. What shall we do, Lededje?”
She thought. “The smartest thing?” she suggested.

They are. But in Special Circumstances we deal in the moral equivalent of black holes, where the normal laws — the rules of right and wrong that people imagine apply everywhere else in the universe — break down; beyond those metaphysical event horizons, there exist . . . special circumstances.” She smiled. “That’s us. That’s our territory; our domain.” “To some people,” he said, “that might sound like just a good excuse for bad behavior.