"I adore weapons. Of every sort."
From Excession, by Iain M. Banks:
"It could see that - by some criteria - a warship, just by the perfectly articulated purity of its purpose, was the most beautiful single artefact the Culture was capable of producing, and at the same time understand the paucity of moral vision such a judgement implied. To fully appreciate the beauty of a weapon was to admit to a kind of short-sightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation of weapons was a kind of tragedy."