Torture Quotes - Page 23

• I saw the various museum displays including scenes of torture while feeling heartfelt remorse and sorrow over the great pain and suffering inflicted on South Koreans by Japan's colonial rule.

  Junichiro Koizumi

  Pain, Museums, Japan

  "Koizumi: 'Heartfelt remorse' for Korean suffering" By Sohn Jie-Ae, www.cnn.com. October 15, 2001.

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• I suppose there must be idiots who dream of signing deals with publishers while fully intending to drink martinis in cool bars or ride around on skateboards. But the actual writers I know are experts in neurotic self-torture. Every page of writing is the result of a thousand tiny decisions and desperate acts of will.

  Helen Garner

  Dream, Writing, Self

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• Quill: An instrument of torture yielded by a goose and commonly weilded by as ass.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Art, Entertainment, Ass

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• Sorry. I'm not, like, medieval torture expert guy.

  Joshua

  Sorry, Guy, Experts

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• Sleep is a most useful and most salutary operation of nature. Scarcely any minor annoyance angers me more than the being suddenly awakened out of a pleasant slumber. I understand that in Italy they torture poor people by depriving them of sleep. `Tis a torture that cannot long be endured.

  Martin Luther

  Sleep, Healing, Long

  Martin Luther (1848). “The table talk or familiar discourse of Martin Luther, tr. by W. Hazlitt”, p.316

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• But Thee, but Thee, O sovereign Seer of time,
  But Thee, O poets' Poet, Wisdom's Tongue,
  But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love,
  O perfect life in perfect labor writ,
  O all men's Comrade, Servant, King, or Priest, --
  What IF or YET, what mole, what flaw, what lapse,
  What least defect or shadow of defect,
  What rumor, tattled by an enemy,
  Of inference loose, what lack of grace
  Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's --
  Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee,
  Jesus, good Paragon, Thou Crystal Christ?

  Sidney Lanier

  Best Love, Jesus, Kings

  Sidney Lanier (1999). “Poems of Sidney Lanier”, p.32, University of Georgia Press

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• Aside from the occasional genocide, oppression, evil and torture, etc., it is inarguable that public policy could be implemented more rapidly in an autocracy.

  David Harsanyi

  Evil, Etc, Oppression

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• When it comes to animal agriculture, there is conventional, which is rally hideous, and 'compassionate' and 'certified humane' or whatever, which 'may' be 'slightly' less hideous. But it is all torture. It's all wrong. These 'happy' gimmicks are just designed to make the public feel better about exploiting animals. Don't buy the propaganda of 'happy' exploitation. Go vegan and promote veganism.

  Gary L. Francione

  Feel Better, Animal, Agriculture

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• One of the great unresolved psychological enigmas of the modern western world is the question of what or who has persuaded us to accept as virtually axiomatic a self-view and a world-view that demand we reject out of hand the wisdom and vision of our major philosophers and poets in order to imprison our thought and our very selves in the materialist, mechanical and dogmatic torture-chamber devised by purely quantitative and third-rate scientific minds.

  Philip Sherrard

  Self, Views, Hands

  Philip Sherrard (1992). “Human image, world image: the death and resurrection of sacred cosmology”, Sophia Perennis

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• So long as space remains, So long sentient beings' suffering remain, I will remain, In order to help, in order to serve... I am nothing but a servant to provide to others. So if you provide some happiness, some comfort to others, then your life becomes meaningful. If your life creates problems or suffering to others, then there's no meaning to your existence.

  Dalai Lama

  Meaningful, Order, Space

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• I had to do something. A young man came into my home for protection. Is he dangerous? No. Is he a spy? No. Is he a traitor? No. He's just a Jewish teenager who wants to leave.

  Chiune Sugihara

  Teenager, Home, Men

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• The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Indifference creates evil. Hatred is evil itself. Indifference is what allows evil to be strong, what gives it power.

  Elie Wiesel

  Strong, Hate, Love Is

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• I often think that the ideal of our perfection that we set up, and often go through torture to achieve, may not be God's idea of how He wants us to be at all. That may be something quite different that we never would have thought of, and what seems like a failure to us may really be something bringing us closer to His will for us.

  Caryll Houselander

  Thinking, Ideas, Perfection

  Caryll Houselander (2005). “Caryll Houselander: Essential Writings”

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• Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment, naive as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to bless, to love, to build, to forgive and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate.

  George Steiner

  Hate, Believe, People

  Interview with D.J.R. Bruckner, www.nytimes.com. 1982.

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• There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information - the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then it may be justified.

  Noam Chomsky

  Information, May, Assumption

  Noam Chomsky (2016). “Who Rules the World?”, p.39, Metropolitan Books

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• Tortures are a dangerous invention, and seem to be a test of endurance rather than of truth.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Endurance, Tests, Violence

  Michel de Montaigne (1958). “Complete Essays”, p.266, Stanford University Press

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• One line typed twenty years ago
  can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
  to glorify art as detachment
  or torture of those we
  did not love but also
  did not want to kill.

  Adrienne Rich

  Art, Wall, Years

  Adrienne Rich (1993). “Your Native Land, Your Life”, p.27, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The delights of this life are not its own, but our fear of the ascent into a higher life; the torments of this life are not its own, but our self-torment because of that fear.

  Franz Kafka

  Life, Fear, Self

  Franz Kafka (1991). “The Blue Octavo Notebooks”

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• I am the wound and the knife!
  I am the slap and the cheek!
  I am the limbs and the rack,
  And the victim and the executioner!
  I am the vampire of my own heart.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Heart, Knives, Self

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• The United States is now relearning an ancient lesson, dating back to the Roman Empire. Brutalizing an enemy only serves to brutalize the army ordered to do it. Torture corrodes the mind of the torturer.

  James Risen

  Army, Dating, Mind

  James Risen (2014). “Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War”, p.165, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Regrettably, it has become clear that torture of detainees in United States custody is not limited to Abu Ghraib or even Iraq. Since Abu Ghraib, there have been increasing reports of torture.

  Marty Meehan

  Iraq, United States, Custody

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• If I can't enjoy the full and total happiness of love, then I want to drain its torments, its tortures to the dregs; then I want the woman I love to mistreat me, betray me, and the more cruelly the better. That too is a pleasure.

  Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

  Want, Pleasure, Drains

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• From his style, you’d think Jason Brannon was the dark double of Ray Bradbury. He cares more about character and realism than most writers I’ve read and his plots flow like well-orchestrated music. Indeed, Brannon’s writing has a classical feel, reminiscent of the best traditional work in the genre, even when he’s going for gut-wrenching terror and torture in-extremis.

  Michael Arnzen

  Character, Writing, Dark

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• Diets are based on the unspoken fear that you are a madwoman, a food terrorist, a lunatic…The promise of a diet is not only that you will have a different body; it is that in having a different body, you will have a different life. If you hate yourself enough, you will love yourself. If you torture yourself enough, you will become a peaceful, relaxed human being.

  Geneen Roth

  Hate, Love You, Peaceful

  Geneen Roth (2011). “Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything”, p.73, Simon and Schuster

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• And I've known people who came out with a sense of torture.

  George Weinberg

  People, Known

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