Torture Quotes - Page 29

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

  Karl Lehenbauer

  Ought

  7 Copy quote

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

  Steven Spielberg

  Hair, Gray, Pubic Hair

  4 Copy quote

• Personally I didn't believe God had a private torture chamber. Hell was being cut off from God, cut off from his power, his energy, Him.

  Laurell K. Hamilton

  Believe, Cutting, Energy

  Laurell K. Hamilton (2002). “Burnt Offerings: An Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Novel”, p.229, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have no fear of the Hereafter. An orthodox hell could hardly be more torture than my life has been.

  Robert E. Howard

  No Fear, Hell, Orthodox

  Letter to Tevis Clyde Smith, July 1925.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• In my mind I first felt like, Oh, I'll be back to work right after the babies are born. But then you don't want to. Even now, it's very difficult for me to leave them in the morning. It just tortures me. I'm like, It's been hours; are they wondering where I am? Do they know that I love them so much and I'm thinking only about them?

  Jennifer Lopez

  Baby, Morning, Thinking

  "Jennifer Lopez: Still Wild at Heart". Interview with Veronica Chambers, www.glamour.com. August 2, 2010.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• How can there be democracy if the leadership in the United States and Britain don't uphold the values which my father's generation fought the Nazis, millions of people gave their lives against the Soviet Union's regime, didn't they? Because of what? Democracy. And what democracy meant. No torture, no camps, no detention forever or without trial, without charges. In solitary confinement. Those techniques which are not just alleged, they have actually been written about by the FBI. I don't think it's being far left - I hope that I'm wrong to consider that it's far left to uphold the rule of law.

  Vanessa Redgrave

  Father, Thinking, Law

  9 Copy quote

• It is not an opinion that "enhanced interrogation techniques" are torture. It is a legal fact. And it is also a legal fact that the president is a war criminal.

  Andrew Sullivan

  War, Interrogation Techniques, President

  "What 'Torture' Is". "The Daily Dish", www.theatlantic.com. May 18, 2007.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• That's what torture does: it creates a miasma of unknowing, about as dangerous a situation in wartime as one can imagine. This hideous fate was made possible by an inexperienced president with a fundamentalist psyche and a paranoid and power-hungry vice-president who decided to embrace "the dark side" almost as soon as the second tower fell, and who is still trying to avenge Nixon. Until they are both gone from office, we are in grave danger the kind of danger that only torturers and fantasists and a security strategy based on coerced evidence can conjure up.

  Andrew Sullivan

  Fate, Dark, Office

  "Imaginationland". "The Daily Dish", www.theatlantic.com. October 25, 2007.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you suspend the Geneva Conventions, give the green light to anything that will get intelligence, round up thousands all over the globe with reckless disregard for guilt or innocence, you are effectively and knowingly issuing orders to seize innocent people and torture them. Any president who decides to do that and then says it was not his intention to do that is a fraud or a fool.

  Andrew Sullivan

  Order, Light, Giving

  "'Disgrace', Ctd". "The Daily Dish", www.theatlantic.com. June 19, 2008.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In spite of muzzling the press, imprisoning thousands, and engaging in torture, kidnapping and murder, the Socialist government was still vulnerable to the accusation of being "soft on Basques.

  Mark Kurlansky

  Socialist Government, Murder, Vulnerable

  Mark Kurlansky (2010). “The Basque History of the World”, p.294, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Religion has never befriended the cause of humaneness. Its monstrous doctrine of eternal punishment and the torture of the damned underlies much of the barbarity with which man has treated man; and the deep division imagined by the Church between the human being, with his immortal soul, and the soulless "beasts", has been responsible for an incalculable sum of cruelty.

  Henry Stephens Salt

  Men, Soul, Church

  "Seventy Years Among Savages". Book by Henry Stephens Salt, 1921.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• What makes this so remarkable is that this is the first time the United States is accountable for its record on torture with regard to some of the practices implemented after 9/11.

  Jennifer Daskal

  Practice, United States, Records

  4 Copy quote

• Nobody would say the cowshed was heaven and nobody would say the inhuman torture of so many victims be called a revolution of the proletariat. ... A museum should be established to remind China of the follies and disasters that had fallen from 1966 to 1976. We cannot forget what had happened and history should not repeat itself.

  Ba Jin

  Museums, Heaven, Revolution

  "Pioneers of Modern China: Understanding the Inscrutable Chinese". Book by Khoon Choy Lee, 2005.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Man, full of emptiness and torn apart with homesickness for the desert has had to create from within himself an adventure, a torture-chamber, an unsafe and hazardous wilderness- this fool, this prisoner consumed with longing and despair, became the inventor of 'bad conscience'.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Adventure, Men, Despair

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2006). “Nietzsche: 'On the Genealogy of Morality' and Other Writings Student Edition”, p.57, Cambridge University Press

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Divorce is simply modern society's version of medieval torture. Except it lasts longer and leaves deeper scars. A divorce releases the most primitive emotions; the ugliest, raw feelings. Emotionally wounded people do their best to inflict pain upon the other party, but rather than using claws they use divorce lawyers.

  William Shatner

  Pain, Party, Divorce

  William Shatner (2009). “Up Till Now”, p.136, Pan Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The new CIA torture report is 6 million pages long. It's almost as long as a George Clooney pre-nup.

  David Letterman

  Long, Pages, Cia

  4 Copy quote

• Child labor, not a problem. Censorship, not a problem. Torture, not a problem. Chewing gum in China - oh, my God! You better not be over here chewing gum.

  David Letterman

  Children, Gum, Censorship

  8 Copy quote

• If you believe Jesus ever had a good word for war or torture or tax cuts for the rich, or raping the earth, or refusing water to dying migrants, then you might as well believe bunnies lay painted eggs.

  Bill Maher

  Jesus, War, Believe

  "HBO Real Time" with Bill Maher, votesmart.org. March 31, 2006.

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• If the knowledge of torture of others makes you sick, it is a case of sympathy... It can be argued that behaviour based on sympathy is in an important sense egoistic, for one is oneself pleased at others' pleasure and pained at others' pain, and the pursuit of one's own utility may thus be helped by sympathetic action.

  Amartya Sen

  Pain, Sick, Religion

  Amartya Kumar Sen (1997). “Choice, Welfare and Measurement”, p.92, Harvard University Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• It must be observed that fishing with any living bait is to be condemned for the same reason as fishing with a worm: in all such instances we torture two animals at once for our amusement.

  Thomas Young

  Animal, Lakes, Sea

  Thomas Young (1798). “An Essay on Humanity to Animals”, p.90

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Anglers boast of the innocence of their pastime; yet it puts fellow-creatures to the torture. They pique themselves on their meditative faculties; and yet their only excuse is a want of thought.

  Leigh Hunt

  Sea, Fishing, Rivers

  Leigh Hunt (1859). “Works”, p.38

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• To large numbers of American citizens life in certain parts of the country becomes intolerably hazardous. They may be seized on any pretext, however flimsy, and put to death with horrible tortures. No government pretending to be civilized can go on condoning such atrocities. Either it must make every possible effort to put them down or it must suffer the scorn and contempt of Christendom.

  H. L. Mencken

  Country, Government, Lynching

  21 Copy quote

• Thanks to the toleration preached by the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, the sorcerer is exempt from torture.

  Honore de Balzac

  Atheism, Thanks, Century

  4 Copy quote

• From Augustine down, theologians have tried to compel people to accept their special interpretation of the Scripture, and the tortures of the inquisition, the rack, the thumb-screw, the stake, the persecutions of witchcraft, the whipping of naked women through the streets of Boston, banishment, trials of heresy, the halter about Garrison's neck, Lovejoy's death, the branding of Captain Walker, shouts of infidel and atheist, have all been for this purpose.

  Matilda Joslyn Gage

  Atheist, Boston, People

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Brownell Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage (1979). “History of Woman Suffrage”, Ayer Company Pub

  22 Copy quote

  Show source

• Some think guts is sprinting at the end of a race. But guts is what got you there to begin with. Guts start back in the hills with 6 miles to go and you're thinking of how you can get out of this race without anyone noticing. Guts begin when you still have forty minutes of torture left and you're already hurting more than you ever remember.

  George A. Sheehan

  Running, Hurt, Thinking

  14 Copy quote