Torture Quotes - Page 15

• In the future, torture will once again become the recreational sport of the rich.

  Douglas Coupland

  Sports, Rich

  Douglas Coupland (1993). “Shampoo Planet”, p.56, Simon and Schuster

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• A successful current affairs television show seems to be more and more a cross between a music hall turn and a scene in a torture chamber.

  Harold MacMillan

  Successful, Political, Television

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• Remember one very fundamental thing about life: Any experience that has not been lived will hang around you, will persist: "Finish me! Live me! Complete me!" There is an intrinsic quality in every experience that it tends and wants to be finished, completed. Once completed, it evaporates; incomplete, it persists, it tortures you, it haunts you, it attracts your attention. It says, "What are you going to do about me? I am still incomplete - fulfill me!"

  Rajneesh

  Inspirational, Life, Wise

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• All this happiness on display is suspect... If they think - and they could be right - that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they should be sombre in their view.

  Ian Mcewan

  Thinking, Views, Political

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• It should be forbidden and severely punished to remove cancer by cutting, burning, cautery, and other fiendish tortures. It is from nature that the disease comes, and from nature comes the cure, not from physicians.

  Paracelsus

  Cancer, Cutting, Burning

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• Do people believe in human rights because such rights actually exist, like mathematical truths, sitting on a cosmic shelf next to the Pythagorean theorem just waiting to be discovered by Platonic reasoners? Or do people feel revulsion and sympathy when they read accounts of torture, and then invent a story about universal rights to help justify their feelings?

  Jonathan Haidt

  Believe, Pythagorean Theorem, Rights

  Jonathan Haidt (2012). “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion”, p.32, Vintage

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• To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.

  Stanislaw Lem

  Men, Pleasure, Knows

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• Not all the Americans in Iraq are those who torture and murder, or course they're not, I don't know how many are doing it, I know it is systematic throughout the United States military I think that's been revealed.

  John Pilger

  Military, Thinking, Iraq

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• I want to remind priests that the confessional must not be a torture chamber but rather an encounter with the Lord’s mercy which spurs us on to do our best. A small step, in the midst of great human limitations, can be more pleasing to God than a life which appears outwardly in order but moves through the day without confronting great difficulties. Everyone needs to be touched by the comfort and attraction of God’s saving love, which is mysteriously at work in each person, above and beyond their faults and failings.

  Pope Francis

  Moving, Order, Small Steps

  Pope Francis (2014). “The Joy of the Gospel”, p.17, BookBaby

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• The racist dog policemen must withdraw immediately from our communities, cease their wanton murder and brutality and torture of black people, or face the wrath of the armed people.

  Huey Newton

  Dog, Wrath, People

  Huey P Newton (2011). “The Huey P. Newton Reader”, p.149, Seven Stories Press

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• The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.

  Charles Bukowski

  Betrayal, Males, Damnation

  "Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life". Book by Howard Sounes, 1998.

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• There's no Hell mentioned in the Old Testament. The punishment of the dead is not specified there. It's only with gentle Jesus, meek and mild, that the idea of eternal torture for minor transgressions is introduced.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Jesus, Punishment, Ideas

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• We must all die. But that I can save him from days of torture, that is what I feel as my great and ever new privilege. Pain is a more terrible lord of mankind than even death itself.

  Albert Schweitzer

  Pain, Privilege, Lord

  Albert Schweitzer (2014). “A Treasury of Albert Schweitzer”, p.66, Open Road Media

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• The war against terrorism is a war against those who engage in torture.

  Ed Markey

  War, Engagement, Terrorism

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• Who you are, in truth, who everyone is, is whole and perfect and beautiful. And if that can be recognized, then it is possible that self-torture can stop!

  Gangaji

  Beautiful, Self, Perfect

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• Death is not as terrible as you think. It comes to you as a healer. Sleep is nothing but a counterfeit death. What happens in death we can picture in sleep. All our sufferings vanish in sleep. When death comes, all our mortal tortures cease; they cannot go beyond the portals of death.

  Paramahansa Yogananda

  Death, Sleep, Thinking

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• But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

  Ayn Rand

  Life, Frustration, Men

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.212, Penguin

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• ... the United States, for generations, has sustained two parallel but opposed states of mind about military atrocities and human rights: one of U.S. benevolence, generally held by the public, and the other of ends-justify-the-means brutality sponsored by counterinsurgency specialists. Normally the specialists carry out their actions in remote locations with little notice in the national press. That allows the public to sustain its faith in a just America, while hard-nosed security and economic interests are still protected in secret.

  Robert Parry

  Military, War, Mean

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• Oh, you ask me, what is the greatest torture of a person who does portraits for a living? I could fill several volumes with nice nasty stories. I don't know.

  Imogen Cunningham

  Nice, Portraits, Doe

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• For those for whom the sex act has come to seem mechanical and merely the meeting and manipulation of body parts, there often remains a hunger which can be called metaphysical but which is not recognized as such, and which seeks satisfaction in physical danger, or sometimes in torture, suicide, or murder.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Suicide, Sex, Body

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• Instead of using this space to pretend the newly released CIA 'torture' report confirms that the United States is the most evil nation in the history of the universe, I'm going to address Jonathan Gruber's confirmation that he believes we're all stupid.

  David Limbaugh

  Stupid, Believe, Space

  David Limbaugh “The Left's Assault on the American Idea”, Creators Publishing

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• O joy of suffering! To struggle against great odds! to meet enemies undaunted! To be entirely alone with them! to find how much one can stand! To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium, death, face to face! To mount the scaffold! to advance to the muzzles of guns with perfect nonchalance! To be indeed a God!

  Walt Whitman

  Death, Struggle, Gun

  Walt Whitman (1870). “Passage to India”, p.51, Haskell House Pub Limited

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• When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of those gyms their scary-looking gym equipment, and they're going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture.

  Douglas Coupland

  California, Scary, Culture

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• ...I couldn't but surmise that the devil, looking at the cruel wars that Christianity has occasioned, the persecutions, the tortures Christian has inflicted on Christian, the unkindness, the hypocracy, the intolerance, must consider the balance sheet with complacency. And when he remembers that it has laid upon mankind the bitter burden of the sense of sin that has darkened the beauty of the starry night and cast a baleful shadow on the passing plesures of a world to be enjoyed, he must chuckle as he murmurs: give the devil his due.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Christian, War, Night

  W. Somerset Maugham (2008). “The Razor's Edge”, p.226, Random House

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• Where Young must torture his invention To flatter knaves, or lose his pension.

  Jonathan Swift

  Knaves, Flattery, Invention

  Jonathan Swift (1823). “The select works of Jonathan Swift ...: containing the whole of his poetical works ... embellished with engravings”, p.55

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