Quotes about torture

J.M. Coetzee - Waiting for the Barbarians

Schmerz ist Wahrheit alles andere wird angezweifelt.

M.F. Moonzajer -

The survival of religion is on the basis of torture and punishment end of torture is end of religion.

M.L Rapier -

There is sometimes a fine line between a cop and a criminal. What drives their personality may be the same, and they have simply chosen different roles and professions to call their own."Dr. ML Rapier PhD, Clinical Psychologist.

Corey Ann Haydu - OCD Love Story

Torture: knowing something makes no sense, but doing it anyways.

William Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet: Plain Text: The Graphic Novel

Tis torture, and not mercy. Heaven is here Where Juliet lives, and every cat and dog And little mouse, every unworthy thing, Live here in heaven and may look on her, But Romeo may not.

Danielle Esplin - Give It Back

A familiar sensation sparks inside me, the one I had a few years ago, the one that hurts because it’s dangerous and overwhelming. Knowing how it is to truly love someone is torturous. You try to bury that feeling. So you become lonely, deprived, and when you sense anything remotely like it, the emotion comes back to haunt you. It’s one sick fucking game.

Steve Maraboli -

Hate is self-inflicted torture. It hungers for revenge, damage, division, and violence, but is never satiated. Hate is a psychological hell to which we condemn ourselves and endeavor to burn others.

Stanisław Lem -

To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.

Jane Austen - Sense and Sensibility

I cannot, I cannot,' cried Marianne; 'leave me, leave me, if I distress you; leave me, hate me, forget me! But do not torture me so. Oh! how easy for those who have no sorrow of their own to talk of extertion!

Michael Monroe - Afterlife

Ask very pointed questions. Sharp as sword blades, or laser blasts, if you catch my meaning.

Mia Moore - 22

When Lisa awoke she was back in the cell on the floor covered in her own blood, dirt, and urine. And that was only day 1.

Comte de Lautréamont - Maldoror and Poems

One should let one's nails grow for a fortnight. O, how sweet it is to drag brutally from his bed a child with no hair on his upper lip and with wide open eyes, make as if to touch his forehead gently with one's hand and run one's fingers through his beautiful hair. Then suddenly, when he is least expecting it, to dig one's long nails into his soft breast, making sure, though, that one does not kill him; for if he died, one would not later be able to contemplate his agonies. Then one drinks his

Susan Sontag -

But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.

Steen Langstrup - Metro

My doppelganger wraps the ear in a handkerchief and shoves it into his pocket as he leaves the train with a nod of his head in my direction.”William Wilson in the short story 'Metro' by Steen Langstrup

Marcel Proust - Swann's Way

... sterile, splendid torture of understanding and loving...

Cedric Nye - Jango's Anthem

Spittle flew from Jango’s lips as he shouted at the man in a woman’s voice that sounded like it was made of cyanide and sugar that had been laced with the patter of blood dripping on an abattoir floor, “This is the truth about The Killer, ain’t it baby? You’re just a big ol’ bag of screams under all that big, bad muscle, ain’t you?

Christopher Hitchens - Hitch-22: A Memoir

[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.

Eduardo Galeano -

Pedro Algorta, a lawyer, showed me the fat dossier about the murder of two women. The double crime had been committed with a knife at the end of 1982, in a Montevideo suburb. The accused, Alma Di Agosto, had confessed. She had been in jail more than a year, and was apparently condemned to rot there for the rest of her life. As is the custom, the police had raped and tortured her. After a month of continuous beatings they had extracted several confessions. Alma Di Agosto's confessions did not muc

Justina Chen - North of Beautiful

Silence, too, can be torture.

M.F. Moonzajer -

I cannot give up on my values and beliefs for the sake of respecting someone else’s values and morals. Because those values explain who am I. I prefer struggling and even dying for what I believe and what I don’t believe. Silence is not respect; it is not condemning brutality and cruelty, and neglecting your own existence as human being. I will be killed and so many others because of standing against the fallacy and misleading notion of religions. They will torture us and cut us in pieces alive

Mahavira -

Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.

Jonathan Glover -

The reality is that in many countries torture of the most revolting cruelty happens routinely, often under the auspices of governments with good relations with Europe and the United States, sometimes using equipment knowingly supplied by Western companies. There is little reason to think torture is in retreat. The festival of cruelty is in full swing.

Jonathan Glover - Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century

In its report issued that year, 1991, Amnesty International recorded protests against human rights abuses in over fifty countries, the protest to thirteen countries making specific reference to torture. These are the kinds of thing many of us have a vague background awareness of, without there being much publicity unless the perpetrators are some currently loathed regime, or unless some highly visible Westerner is among the victims.

A. Petrov -

Memories and emotions could be the greatest form of torture.

Marcha A. Fox - A Dark of Endless Days

Past memories strobed before him, flashes of joy blackened by the present. Reality teased, then beckoned, home likewise. Confusion dimmed, the answer clear. This could end. Would end. In one of two ways. Still he refused, not ready for either.

Anna Funder - Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human,' Miriam says.

Stuart Francis - GUAN: For strong stomachs only!

I'm not a woman and i'm not a man, i'm just a thing with breasts and a penis".

Keith Haring - Keith Haring Journals

March 28, 1987: Today I read in the New York Times that all of the officers who killed Michael Stewart were again dismissed of charges. Continually dismissed, but in their minds they will never forget. They know they killed him. They will never forget his screams, his face, his blood. The must live with that forever. I hope in their next life they are tortured like they tortured him. They should be birds captured early in life, put in cages, purchased by a fat, smelly, ugly lady who keeps them i

Orson Scott Card -

[T]hat's the way of torturers of every age, to put the blame on the victim, especially when he strikes back.

Lance Conrad - The Price of Loyalty

No healthy mind could bring itself to torture another human being.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - Frankenstein

My reign is not yet over... you live, and my power is complete. Follow me; I seek the everlasting ices of the north, where you will feel the misery of cold and frost to which I am impassive. You will find near this place, if you follow not too tardily, a dead hare; eat and be refreshed. Come on, my enemy; we have yet to wrestle for our lives; but many hard and miserable hours must you endure until that period shall arrive.

Frans de Waal -

Ironically, torture requires empathy, too, in the sense that one cannot deliberately inflict pain without realizing what is painful.

Ralph Ellison -

So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "file and forget," and I can neither file nor forget. Nor will certain ideas forget me; they keep filing away at my lethargy, my complacency. Why should I be the one to dream this nightmare?

Christopher Hitchens - Hitch-22: A Memoir

Many governments employ torture but this was the first time that the element of Saturnalia and pornography in the process had been made so clear to me. If you care to imagine what any inadequate or cruel man might do, given unlimited power over a woman, then anything that you can bring yourself to suspect was what became routine in ESMA, the Navy Mechanics School that became the headquarters of the business. I talked to Dr. Emilio Mignone, a distinguished physician whose daughter Monica had disa

Thomm Quackenbush - Find What You Love and Let It Kill You

Do you know what Hell is? ...No fire, no brimstone. Man in his infinite folly invented that to rob from his brothers their will. Hell is existing without Our Father. None of His love touches me.

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa - The Spider's Thread

As you can imagine, those who had fallen this far had been so worn down by their tortures in the seven other hells that they no longer had the strength to cry out.

Nadège Richards - 5 Miles

My parents say you’re no good, Elijah.” I exhaled and killed the cigarette in the grass.Laughing, Eli’s eyes went to my lips and his hands touched my bare midriff. “Really? And what do you say?”He had brought his lips so close to mine that it became hard to think about my next words when all I wanted to do was crush my mouth to his. I wanted him to completely consume me. “I think you’re broken,” I finally got out, and Eli arched a brow. “But I think I’m broken too. I just don’t know it yet.

Theodor W. Adorno -

It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.

Ryan Hurd - and Wake Up to What Matters Most

... sleep deprivation is an illegal torture method outlawed by the Geneva Convention and international courts, but most of us do it to ourselves.

Marina Nemat - After Tehran: A Life Reclaimed

The way I see Jesus has not changed much at all since I was a child, but my imprisonment and all that followed made me love Him even more. His being the Son of God makes sense to me, because I believe God to be loving, just, forgiving, and merciful. I also believe that He respects free will. After all, He has given it to us so that we can choose to love or hate Him, do good or evil. But is it fair for a loving God to sit on His throne in Heaven and let us struggle and suffer on our own? Would an

Mehmet Murat ildan -

We use horses as our slaves; we chain dogs; we steal eggs from the chickens, honey from the bees; we make wallets out of crocodiles; we imprison the birds; we torture the bulls in the arenas; we whip the lions and beat the tigers in the circuses! What are we? Definitely not ethical creatures!

Aaron B. Powell - Doomsday Diaries

Sometimes it's torturous to think of things we can't possibly have.

Gilles Quispel - The Secret Book of Revelation: The Apocalypse of St John the Divine

During the persecutions under the Emperor Domitian, John was summoned to Rome, where he was tortured by immersion in a pot of boiling oil and subsequently banished to the island of Patmos in the Aegean sea. It was there he wrote his Apocalypse. It was only after the death of Domitian, in A.D. 96, that he returned to Ephesus, where he was still living during the reign of the Emperor Trajan (A.D. 98-117). He became so old and frail that he could no longer walk and had to be carried to meetings and

Christopher Hitchens -

You can't have occupation and human rights.

Alfred Adler -

War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.

Jonathan Glover - Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century

A central part of the torturer’s craft is to make his job easier by stripping the victim of protective dignity.

A.R. Braun - Autonomy

I know mine own!

Bill Shapiro - Other People's Love Letters: 150 Letters You Were Never Meant to See

This is torture, torture, torture.Why is this so hard?? I survived whole days not talking to you before. What happened???I'm not as nice in the world today. I am scowly. I am trying to be good and not fussy, but frankly, this is less fun. And I am getting grumpy about the prospect of many, many more days like this ahead.

Anthony Liccione -

The fears we keep alive, will be a recurring haunt until it dies, or we do.

Gaston Leroux - Phantom of the Opera

I say, `Woe to them that have a nose, a real nose,and come to look round the torture-chamber! Aha, aha, aha!

A.P. Sweet - The Abattoir of Silence

shall we dance into the perpetual torture of our union once more?

Jesse Ventura -

It's convenient how everyone who supports waterboarding and torture, or "enhanced interrogation techniques" as they like to call it, have never experienced it themselves. Yet everyone who has, myself included, are firmly against it.

Darius M. Rejali - Torture and Democracy

But *why* do clean torture and democracy appear to go hand in hand? This is an important puzzle (though by no means the only one suggested by the data). My explanation for this pattern generally is this: Public monitoring leads institutions that favor painful coercion to use and combine clean torture techniques to evade detection, and, to the extent that public monitoring is not only greater in democracies, but that public monitoring of human rights is a core value in modern democracies, it is t

Anthony Marra - A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Of course he was required to wear a seat belt, just as he was required to give directions to a torture camp, because stupidity was the single abiding law of the universe.

James Marshall Smith - Silent Source

Like fashion, torture comes in a variety of styles.

Bryant McGill - Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

There is nothing worse than fear. Fear is worse than cancer, fear is worse than torture, fear is worse than betrayal and fear is even worse than death.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint - Television

For the painful essence of withdrawal does not reside in the present suffering it brings - withdrawal is painless on the level of the immediate moment - but in the prospect of suffering to come, the rich future that one can imagine one's torture enjoying.

Anton Chekhov - Ivanov

Ivanov: Once I worked hard and thought a lot but I never got tired; now I do nothing and think of nothing, but I'm tired in body and spirit. My conscience aches day and night, I feel deeply guilty but I don't understand where I am actually at fault. And add to that my wife's illness, my lack of money, the constant bickering, gossip, unnecessary conversations, that stupid Borkin... My home has become loathsome to me and I find living there worse than torture.

Chuck Palahniuk - Doomed

The only thing that makes the present palatable is the fact that the past was, at times, torture.

Shelley Noble - Beach Colors

Bad memories were hard enough, but it was torture to be haunted by the good.

Poppy Z. Brite -

Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness.

Rosamund Hodge - Cruel Beauty

His kindness was only meant to make later torments crueler.

Robert G. Ingersoll -

Exoneration of Jesus Christ If Christ was in fact God, he knew all the future.Before Him like a panorama moved the history yet to be. He knew how his words would be interpreted.He knew what crimes, what horrors, what infamies, would be committed in his name. He knew that the hungry flames of persecution would climb around the limbs of countless martyrs. He knew that thousands and thousands of brave men and women would languish in dungeons in darkness, filled with pain.He knew that his church wou

Robert G. Ingersoll -

The doctrine of eternal punishment is in perfect harmony with the savagery of the men who made the orthodox creeds. It is in harmony with torture, with flaying alive, and with burnings. The men who burned their fellow-men for a moment, believed that God would burn his enemies forever.

Yōko Ogawa - Revenge

For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls , drop after drop after drop, like the second hand of a watch, carving up time. The shock of each individual drop is insignificant, but the sensation is impossible to ignore. At first, one might manage to think about other things, but after five hours, after ten hours, it becomes unendurable. The repeated stimulation excites the nerves to a point where they lit

Victor Hugo - Les Misérables

This exists. It can be seen. It can be touched. These in pace, these dungeons, these iron hinges, these necklets, that lofty peep-hole on a level with the river's current, that box of stone closed with a lid of granite like a tomb, with this difference, that the dead man here was a living being, that soil which is but mud, that vault hole, those oozing walls, --what declaimers!

Dawn Jayne - Uprising

The words were pulled from her, agonizing, like a disembowelment.

Emma Winters - Equal Parts

- 'I just... I was thinking of Achilles. It's our anniversarý tomorrow, and I'd really like to get him a present. Maybe I could sneak out tonight and be back in time for... for Patrick's visit tomorrow.'- 'Ohh, what are you going to get him?'Hell. This was torture in itself.- 'A new hammer. One with my name engraved on the side.' - Sure. why not?She sighed happily.- 'That's a cute idea!

Jesse Ventura -

If Waterboarding is okay, then why don't we let our police do it to criminals so they can find out what they know? Because it's against the law. If we're not going to be a country that stand's for the rule of law, when it's convenient or inconvenient, then what DO we stand for.

Melissa Andrea - Flutter

The silkiness of his voice was a torturous caress that I could have endured for the rest of my life.

LEONORA MORRISON - The Bed and the Bookcase

Why am I impatient I am unsure for what is patience? And why should I ultimately feel that I am lacking in it. Is it timing? Waiting? Abstaining? Obligation? Longing? Torture? Perseverance? Discipline? Wanting? Someone recently referred to it as a staring contest between yourself, fate, god and chance. He also referred to it as a tease, a flirt. It's staring at her image when you want to hear her voice, feel her breath, taste her skin. Patience is the recovery from a really hot dream interrupte

Thomas Jefferson -

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

Jesse Ventura -

It's a good thing I'm not the president, because I would prosecute everybody who was involved in that torture, I would prosecute the people who did it, I would prosecute the people who ordered it and they would all go to jail! Because Torture is against the law!

Frances Conroy -

Marriage is an exercise in torture.

Nick Flynn - The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009

Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn't happened to you yet, consider yourself lucky. When it does, when one day you look around and nothing is recognizable, when you find yourself alone in a dark wood having lost the way, you may find it easier to blame it on someone else -- an errant lover, a missing father, a bad childhood -- o

Joanne Harris - Chocolat

Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or tortuous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive.

Umberto Eco - The Name of the Rose

Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him ... These things I know, Ubertino; I also have belonged to those groups of men who beli

Mike Norton -

The nostalgia of a moment's love can be an illusionary precipice from which we fall from truth; in heartbreak, what we escape to in the past is what tortures us in the present.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Part One

Wild dreams torment me as I lie. And though a god lives in my heart, though all my power waken at his word, though he can move my every inmost part - yet nothing in the outer world is stirred. thus by existence tortured and oppressed I crave for death, I long for rest.

Kiki Archer - But She Is My Student

She realised with every inch of her being that she wanted Freya; she was in love with Freya. Her mind, with its perfectly rational arguments, had list the battle with her heart. She felt it. It was real. The conflict was torture.

George Orwell - 1984

Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.

Sadhguru - Of Mystics & Mistakes

The longing for peace has essentially come from troubled minds, minds that are torturing themselves. For them, peace is a big commodity that they have to seek. If you are not using your mind for self-torture, why would you think of peace? Would you seek the exuberance of life or would you seek peace? Only if you have become an expert in self-torture, peace seems to be the greatest thing.

George Orwell - 1984

The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?

S.M. Boyce - Treason

Where are we? -BraedenIn the deepest part of your mind, where Carden can never find you. It's the goodness you've developed despite everything, the kindness and love you're capable of even though you were born to kill. Hide here with me, and he'll never find us. -Kara

Nick Flynn - The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir

I’ve come to believe that the function of torture in our society is not about getting information, in spite of what we might want to believe. It is merely about power. It tells the world that there is now no limit to what we will do when we feel threatened.

John Fowles - The Collector

This pain, this terrible seeing-through that is in me now. It wasn't necessary. It is all pain, and it buys nothing. Gives birth to nothing.All in vain. All wasted.The older the world becomes, the more obvious it is. The bomb and the tortures in Algeria and the starving babies in the Congo. It gets bigger and darker.More and more suffering for more and more. And more and more in vain.

Ritika Chhabra - A Dark Love

How can he call it all fun? Does all this. all this trauma and torture that he made me go through means nothing? What if he had to go through the same, what then? What if his legs would be itching right now from all the pain that they spent being dragged?

Rachel Cinelli -

Imagine you are tied to a chair with your hands tightly bound behind you, preventing you from covering your ears. Before you is a giant chalkboard. A woman enters the room. Her fingernails are long, hard, and ready for attack. You follow her with your eyes as she saunters to the chalkboard and raises her hand to make a claw. She looks at you with a blank stare as she digs her fingernails into the chalkboard and drags downward. As the harsh sound hits your ears, you squeeze your eyes shut in an i

Olli Jalonen -

Anyone even remotely suspect was interrogated, because interrogation is by far the most effective method of speedily banishing inappropriate thoughts from the mind.

Nick Spencer - Vol. 1: For a Better Future

The hour of our release draws near.

C. JoyBell C. -

When you walk into a chocolate store, suddenly the most difficult decision you will ever have to make in your life, is which chocolates to pick! It is pure torture! Especially when you are in Belgium surrounded by Belgian chocolates!

Christopher Hitchens - Hitch-22: A Memoir

It was well said—by Jean Tarrou in The Plague, I think—that attendance at lectures in an unknown language will help to hone one's awareness of the exceedingly slow passage of time. I once had the experience of being 'waterboarded' and can now dimly appreciate how much every second counts in the experience of the torture victim, forced to go on enduring what is unendurable.

Joe Hill - The Fireman

Fear does not incline people to be moderate in their use of extreme tactics.

Zoe Cruz - Beastia

At this point, I realize: He is making a monster of me.

Zoe Cruz - Beastia

I’ll rid the world of each one of you,” he whispered. “Every single one…

Diet Eman - Things We Couldn't Say

Her face expressed suffering so deep that I will never forget it; her eyes radiated a deep sadness...Mrs. Folmer was oppressed by that special sadness, perhaps the most horrible torture, of those who had no idea what happened to their loved ones.

Mark Lawrence - Prince of Thorns

Cowards make the best torturers. Cowards understand fear and they can use it.

Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet

Is it that my habit of placing myself in the souls of other people makes me see myself as others see or would see me if they noticed my presence there? It is. And once I've perceived what they would feel about me if they knew me, it is as if they were feeling and expressing it at that very moment. It is a torture to me to live with other people. Then there are those who live inside me. Even when removed from life, I'm forced to live with them. Alone, I am hemmed in by multitudes. I have nowhere

Elizabeth Wein - Code Name Verity

Look at me!’ I screeched. ‘Look at me, Amadeus von Linden, you sadistic hypocrite, and watch this time! You’re not questioning me now, this isn’t your work, I’m not an enemy agent spewing wireless code! I’m just a minging Scots slag screaming insults at your daughter! So enjoy yourself and watch! Think of Isolde! Think of Isolde and watch!