Torture Quotes - Page 24

• The natural man inevitably rebels against mathematics, a mild form of torture that could only be learned by painful processes of drill.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Men, Rebel, Painful

  4 Copy quote

• It is not enough to ask, 'Will my act harm other people?' Even if the answer is No, my act may still be wrong, because of its effects on other people. I should ask, 'Will my act be one of a set of acts that will together harm other people?' The answer may be Yes. And the harm to others may be great. If this is so, I may be acting very wrongly, like the Harmless Torturers.

  Derek Parfit

  People, Acting, Together

  20 Copy quote

• There tend to be two different drives that lead young people toward music. One is that music provides an escape; it takes you away from the unhappiness or torture of where you are and makes you feel less alienated-you believe there is a place you fit in somewhere else. The other is a sort of transcendent, spiritual feeling in the purity of music.

  Michael Stipe

  Spiritual, Believe, Two

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• We reject techniques like torture regardless of whether they're effective or ineffective because they are barbaric and harmful on a broad scale. It's the same thing with cyber warfare. We should never be attacking hospitals. We should never be taking down power plants unless that is absolutely necessary to ensure our continued existence as a free people.

  Edward Snowden

  People, Technique, Warfare

  Source: www.pbs.org

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The United States military is now using the music of Metallica and other heavy metal bands to break the will of Saddam Hussein supporters to get them to talk. Theyre blaring heavy metal music at them. That should make the artist feel pretty good, huh? Put your heart and soul into your last CD and the Army is using it to torture people.

  Jay Leno

  Military, Heart, Army

  4 Copy quote

• To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill treatment, indignities, profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, and the wretchedness of the vanquished.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Self, Ill Treatment, Profound

  9 Copy quote

• If any mention was made of homicide, madness, adultery, and intolerable tortures, we would let the church-bells ring louder, the church-organ swell its peal and drown the hideous sound. The sugar they raised was excellent: nobody tasted blood in it.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Church Bells, Blood, Sound

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald A. Bosco, Joel Myerson (2015). “Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.277, Harvard University Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the delusion of masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the assurance that, even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave and torture a man.

  H. L. Mencken

  Women, Hard Times, Law

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.40, Vintage

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is cruelty to children to keep five-year-olds sitting still, gazing into vacancy even for one hour at a time. We have little idea of the torture we thus inflict.

  Ellen Swallow Richards

  Children, Years, Ideas

  8 Copy quote

• Of course,Behaviourism 'works'. So does torture.

  W. H. Auden

  Doe, No Nonsense, Courses

  13 Copy quote

• One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without intermission.

  W. H. Auden

  Discovery, Wish, Important

  4 Copy quote

• If one writes or reads novels from the point of view of psychology, it is very inconsistent and petty to want to shy away from even the slowest and most detailed analysis of the most unnatural lusts, gruesome tortures, shocking infamy, and disgusting sensual or spiritual impotence.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Spiritual, Writing, Views

  5 Copy quote

• Time is never more misspent than while we declaim against the want of it; all our actions are then tinctured with peevishness. The yoke of life is certainly the least oppressive when we carry it with good-humor; and in the shades of rural retirement, when we have once acquired a resolution to pass our hours with economy, sorrowful lamentations on the subject of time misspent and business neglected never torture the mind.

  Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann

  Time, Retirement, Mind

  4 Copy quote

• The woman movement is one which is uniting by co-operating influences, all the antagonisms that are warring on the family state. Spiritualism, free love, free divorce, the vicious indulgences consequent on unregulated civilization, the worldliness which tempts men and women to avoid large families, often by sinful methods, thus making the ignorant masses the chief supply of the future ruling majorities; and most powerful of all, the feeble constitution and poor health of women, causing them to dread maternity as--what it is fast becoming--an accumulation of mental and bodily tortures.

  Catharine Beecher

  Family, Powerful, Divorce

  Catharine Esther Beecher (1871). “Woman Suffrage and Woman's Profession”, p.9

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• White men should exhibit the same insensibility to moral tortures that red men do to physical torments.

  Theophile Gautier

  Men, White, Red

  4 Copy quote

• My religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative revolution. I desire that no public monument or work of art or inscription or sermon or ritual service commemorating me shall suggest that I accepted the tenets peculiar to any established church or denomination nor take the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacrifice.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Religious, Art, Sacrifice

  4 Copy quote

• Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the scheme of things.... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound.

  Dorothy H Cohen

  Children, Order, Giving

  4 Copy quote

• Popular Christianity has for its emblem a gibbet, for its chief sensation a sanginary execution after torture, for its central mystery is an insane vengeance bought off by a trumpery expiation. But there is a nobler and profounder Christianity which affirms the sacred mystery of equality and forbids the glaring futility and folly of vengeance.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Insane, Execution, Sacred

  George Bernard Shaw (2008). “Pygmalion and Major Barbara”, p.41, Bantam Classics

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians who, being burned at the stake, suggested new modes of tortures to their tormentors. Being superior to physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they were superior to any consolation which the missionaries could offer; and the law to do as you would be done by fell with less persuasiveness on the ears of those who, for their part, did not care how they were done by, who loved their enemies after a new fashion, and came very near freely forgiving them all they did.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Fashion, Law, Forgiving

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “Citizen Thoreau: Walden, Civil Disobedience, Life Without Principle, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown”, p.53, Graphic Arts Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Singapore judicial system's shameful recourse to using torture - in the form of caning - to punish crimes that should be misdemeanors is indicative of a blatant disregard for international human rights standards, one of the defendants said that sentencing day was the darkest day of his life, but in reality every day that Singapore keeps caning on its books is a dark day for the country's international reputation.

  Phil Robertson

  Life, Country, Book

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  84 Copy quote

• 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

  20 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

  Show source