They are from a series of books written by Iain M Banks. He's written an online essay on them available at
http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~stefan/culture.html.
Sadly it doesn't go into stuff like military and technology, one has to read the books to get a good idea of those.
"He looked for the Culture ship, then told himself to not to be stupid; it was probably still several trillion kilometres away. That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off . . . and still have no good idea why you were fighting."
Consider Phlebas, page 33
"Statistics Length of war: forty-eight years, one month. Total casualties, including machines (reckoned on logarithmic sentience scale), medjel and non-combatants: 851.4 billion (+- .3%). Losses ships (all classes above interplanetary) - 91,215,660 (+- 200); Orbitals - 14,334; planets and major moons - 53; Rings - 1; Spheres - 3; stars (undergoing significant induced mass-loss or sequence-position alteration) - 6. Historical perspective A small, short war that rarely extended throughout more than .02% of the galaxy by volume and .01% by stellar population. Rumours persist of far more impressive conflicts, stretching through vastly greater amounts of time and space. . . . Nevertheless, the chronicles of the galaxy's elder civilisations rate the Idiran-Culture war as the most significant conflict of the past fifty thousand years, and one of those singularly interesting Events they see so rarely these days."
Consider Phlebas, page 462
and similar such things. I just want to know who they are (and I want LOTSA pics of their ships and tech too!!) 
I also think the concept of an effectorized Vorlon (those arrogant sumbitches!) to be somehow quite amusing too! 
Lata and Happy Fragging!
