2 pieces from Mozi — each retold in modern English and traced to its source.
Steal a peach and the whole town condemns you. Steal an ox and it is worse. Kill one man and you hang for it. So why, Mozi asks, when a ruler invades a whole country and kills thousands, does everyone call it not a crime but glory? A relentless argument that war is simply the largest theft of all.
An engineer builds a war machine that cannot be stopped, and the one man who walks to stop it carries no army — only a question the engineer cannot answer, and a belt he is about to turn into a city wall.