Torture Quotes - Page 28

• Torture, as the art of discovering the truth, is barbaric nonsense; it is the application of a material means to a spiritual end.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Spiritual, Art, Mean

  Charles Baudelaire (1919). “Baudelaire, His Prose and Poetry”

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• Let none falter who thinks he is right, and we may succeed. But if, after all, we shall fail, be it so: we still shall have the proud consolation of saying to our consciences, and to the departed shade of our country's freedom, that the cause approved of our judgment and adored of our hearts, in disaster, in chains, in torture, in death, we never faltered in defending.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Country, Heart, Thinking

  Abraham Lincoln (2012). “The Complete Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln (Biographically Annotated Edition)”, p.196, Jazzybee Verlag

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• The best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with H-bombs might possibly put an end to the human race. It is feared that if many H-bombs are used there will be universal death, sudden only for a minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration.

  Bertrand Russell

  War, Race, Majority

  Bertrand Russell, Andrew G. Bone (2003). “Man's Peril, 1954-55”, p.319, Psychology Press

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• I have seen these ways of God: I know of no reason For fire and change and torture and the old returnings.

  Robinson Jeffers

  Fire, Way, Reason

  Robinson Jeffers, Albert Gelpi (2003). “The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers”, p.46, Stanford University Press

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• I had a hard time watching "Wolf Creek." It is a film with one clear purpose: To establish the commercial credentials of its director by showing his skill at depicting the brutal tracking, torture and mutilation of screaming young women. When the killer severs the spine of one of his victims and calls her "a head on a stick," I wanted to walk out of the theater and keep on walking.

  Roger Ebert

  Hard Times, Skills, Directors

  Roger Ebert's review of "Wolf Creek", www.rogerebert.com. December 22, 2005.

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• Suspense is torture ... but delightful--or there'd be no gambling in the world.

  Ada Leverson

  Gambling, Suspense, World

  Ada Leverson (1907). “The Twelfth Hour”

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• What has gone wrong with the men who are ruling I'd like to know who they think they are fooling They told us that torture was over and gone but everyone knows the same torture goes on

  Peter Weiss

  Men, Thinking, Goes On

  Peter Weiss (1993). “Peter Weiss' The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat: As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade [a Play]”

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• I especially denounce the terrible mass murders, which I cannot understand. I never ordered any killing or tortures where I had the power to prevent such actions!

  Hermann Goring

  Goering, Action, Murder

  Closing statement to the Nuremberg tribunal on August 31, 1946. "Witness to Nuremberg" by Richard Sonnenfeldt, p. 70, 2006.

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• Finishing is torture... There's always some newly seen flaw. But the little glimpses of beauty between the anxiety make it worth it.

  Jacob Collins

  Anxiety, Finishing, Glimpse

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• It's the worst form of torture a person can imagine-the wait to die.

  Tarryn Fisher

  Waiting, Imagine, Form

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• People continued regardless of all that leads man forward to try to unite the incompatibles:;: the virtue of love, and what is opposed to love, namely, the restraining of evil by violence. And such a teaching, despite its inner contradiction, was so firmly established that the very people who recognize love as a virtue accept as lawful at the same time an order of life based on violence and allowing men not merely to torture but even to kill one another.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Teaching, Men, Order

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• It is a tragic hour, that hour when we are finally driven to reckon with ourselves, when every avenue of mental distraction has been cut off and our own life and all its ineffaceable failures closes about us like the walls of that old torture chamber of the Inquisition.

  Willa Cather

  Wall, Failure, Cutting

  Willa Cather (2016). “The First Willa Cather MEGAPACK®: 50 Classic Short Works”, p.134, Wildside Press LLC

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• Torture will give a dozen pence or more To keep a drab from bawling at his door. The public taste is quite a different thing Torture is positively paid to sing.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Doors, Giving, Different

  Hilaire Belloc (1970). “Complete verse [of] H. Belloc: including Sonnets and verse, Cautionary verses, The modern traveller, etc”

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• I have said repeatedly that America doesn't torture and I'm going to make sure that we don't torture. Those are part and parcel an effort to regain America's moral stature in the world.

  Barack Obama

  America, Effort, World

  "Guantanamo Bay Still Unresolved". "Tell Me More" with Michel Martin, www.npr.org. January 14, 2013.

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• In my youth and comparative inexperience I had always regarded the yearning and pangs of love as the worst torture that could afflict the human heart. At this moment, however, I began to realize that there was another and perhaps grimmer torture than that of longing and desiring: that of being loved against one's will and of being unable to defend oneself against the urgency of another's passion; of seeing another human being seared by the flame of her desire and of having to look impotently, lacking the power, the capacity, the strength to pluck her from the flames.

  Stefan Zweig

  Love, Passion, Heart

  "Beware of Pity". Book by Stefan Zweig, 1939.

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• What has here happened is that the instinct of cruelty, which has turned inwards, has become self-torture, and all man's animal instincts have been reinterpreted as guilt towards God. Every Nay man utters to his nature, to his real being, he flings out as a Yea, an affirmation of reality applied to God's sanctity

  Georg Brandes

  Real, Animal, Men

  Georg Brandes (2015). “Friedrich Nietzsche (English Edition)”, p.22, WILLIAM HEINEMANN

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• After 9-11, the President had a historic opportunity to unite Americans and the world in common cause. Instead, by exploiting the politics of fear, instigating an optional war in Iraq before finishing a necessary war in Afghanistan and instituting policies on torture, detainees and domestic surveillance that fly in the face of our values and interests, President Bush divided Americans from each other and from the world.

  Joe Biden

  War, Opportunity, Iraq

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• I have never, God or whatever knows, prostrated myself to be famous, but I would meander through all the sewers of the world, through all degradations and humiliations, in order to paint. I have to do this. Until the last drop every vision that exists in my being must be purged; then it will be a pleasure for me to be rid of this damned torture

  Max Beckmann

  Order, Vision, Degradation

  Stephan Lackner, Max Beckmann (1983). “Max Beckmann”, Crown Pub

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• In the days of witchcraft it used to be believed that if one person secretly made a waxen image of another and stuck pins into the image, its counterpart would suffer tortures, and that if the image was melted the person would die. This superstition is almost realized in the relation between the private self and its social reflection. They seem to separate but are darkly united, and what is done to the one is done to the other.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Reflection, Self, Suffering

  Charles Horton Cooley (1992). “Human Nature and the Social Order”, p.247, Transaction Publishers

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• Who looks at me, beholdeth sorrows all, All pain, all torture, woe and all distress; I have no need on other harms to call, As anguish, languor, cruel bitterness, Discomfort, dread, and madness more and less; Methinks from heaven above the tears must rain In pity for my harsh and cruel pain.

  Geoffrey Chaucer

  Pain, Rain, Heaven

  Geoffrey Chaucer (2012). “Troilus and Cressida”, p.173, Courier Corporation

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• Faith is a gift of God, which man can neither give nor take away by promise of rewards or menace of torture.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Faith, Men, Giving

  "Leviathan". Book by Thomas Hobbes, 1651.

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• The public must come to see that chess is a violent sport. Chess is mental torture.

  Garry Kasparov

  Sports, Chess, Violent

  "Transformation of the nerds: The modern chessplayer is a sleeker creature than the regressive slob of old. But can a game of such arcane difficulty really be glamorised into a global telly sport?" by Martin Amis, www.independent.co.uk. November 07, 1993.

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• I have no doubt that if an actual ticking bomb situation were to arise, our law enforcement authorities would torture. The real debate is whether such torture should take place outside of our legal system or within it. The answer to this seems clear: If we are to have torture, it should be authorized by the law.

  Alan Dershowitz

  Real, Law, Doubt

  "Is There a Torturous Road to Justice?" by Alan Dershowitz, articles.latimes.com. November 8, 2001.

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• Being against torture ought to be sort of a multipartisan thing.

  Karl Lehenbauer

  Ought

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• Oh, torture. Torture. My pubic hairs went gray.

  Steven Spielberg

  Hair, Gray, Pubic Hair

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