Best 238 quotes in «torture quotes» category

He paused, gasping for breath, but continued in a soft, steady voice. "Allie, I...I love you.

He reached through a slit in his robe into a pouch strapped to his ample abdomen. From it he withdrew a small wineskin. "Here," he said, pushing it between the bars. "For strength. For courage." Adelard pulled the stopper and drank greedily. "They don't feed me and give me very little water." How does it feel? Ramiro thought. How many have you treated the same to make them weak and more easily persuaded by your tortures?

Her face expressed suffering so deep that I will never forget it; her eyes radiated a deep sadness...Mrs. Folmer was oppressed by that special sadness, perhaps the most horrible torture, of those who had no idea what happened to their loved ones.

He suffers terribly all the time. He lives in fire.

He steps away from her, going to a little side table and removing a cloth that's lying on top. Underneath are severale shiny bits of metal. Mr. Hammar picks one up. "And now for the second part of our interview", he says, approaching the woman. Who starts to scream. "That was," Davy says, pacing around as we wait outside but it's all he can get out. "That was." He turns to me. "Holy crap, Todd." I don't say nothing, just take the apple I've been saving outta my pocket. "Apple," I whisper to Angharrad, my head close to hers.

He would have been half-hanged, taken down alive, castrated, his genitals stuffed in his mouth, his stomach slit open, and his intestines taken out and burnt, and his carcase chopped into four quarters.

He would have gone days without food or water just to be inside her again. To possess something so wonderful and forbidden. Any torture, any punishment, any sacrifice would have been worth the cost of pleasuring them both until they couldn’t move.

His broken rib was stabbing into his side. The pain was torture, but he did not have time to think about it. He loaded a new magazine and continued shooting.

How can he call it all fun? Does all this. all this trauma and torture that he made me go through means nothing? What if he had to go through the same, what then? What if his legs would be itching right now from all the pain that they spent being dragged?

How could tickling, even though it causes laughter, be at the same time such a vicious form of torture? Sitting on the edge of my bed, I thought it through. I came to the conclusion, at last, that it was like this: Tickling and learning were much the same thing. When you tickle yourself—ecstasy; but when anyone else tickles you—agony.

How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?

How do we find words for describing levels of betrayal and emotional, physical, sexual and spiritual torture that fragment and destroy a child or cast and case traumatic shadows over the whole of adult life? We might, as a society, slowly find it possible to accept that one in four citizens are likely to have experience some form of emotional, psychical, sexual or spiritual abuse (McQueen, Itzin, Kennedy, Sinason, & Maxted, 2008), in itself a figure unimaginable and hidden twenty years ago. However, accepting the way a hurt and hurting parent or stranger re-enacts their disturbance with a vulnerable child or children remains far easier to digest than to consider the intellectually planned, scientific, methodical, procedures of organized child-abusing perpetrators-in other words, torture.

How horrible to think what we may wish for, lay in anguish for, may be within our reach but we are unable to see them.

I cut off his fingers to get him to talk, and when he'd confessed everything I wanted to hear, I had his fucking tongue cut out, and the stump cauterized." Everyone in the room stared at him. "I called him an asshole, too," said Locke. "He didn't like that.

Humanity was an ugly word when such cruelty was inflicted on one another.

I cannot, I cannot,' cried Marianne; 'leave me, leave me, if I distress you; leave me, hate me, forget me! But do not torture me so. Oh! how easy for those who have no sorrow of their own to talk of extertion!

If he goes to sleep peacefully knowing that your heart is hurt, beware of him.

I do wonder sometimes, I do wonder what it is about the human mind that goes to pain and degradation. I do wonder what it is. We talk about original sin. We talk about ignorance. We talk about people not having had a chance. We talk about poverty--a bunch of things--but there is something not quite right about the human species, because, given half a chance, we'd be eating one another.

I know mine own!

If Waterboarding is okay, then why don't we let our police do it to criminals so they can find out what they know? Because it's against the law. If we're not going to be a country that stand's for the rule of law, when it's convenient or inconvenient, then what DO we stand for.

I got hold of a copy of the video that showed how Saddam Hussein had actually confirmed himself in power. This snuff-movie opens with a plenary session of the Ba'ath Party central committee: perhaps a hundred men. Suddenly the doors are locked and Saddam, in the chair, announces a special session. Into the room is dragged an obviously broken man, who begins to emit a robotic confession of treason and subversion, that he sobs has been instigated by Syrian and other agents. As the (literally) extorted confession unfolds, names begin to be named. Once a fellow-conspirator is identified, guards come to his seat and haul him from the room. The reclining Saddam, meanwhile, lights a large cigar and contentedly scans his dossiers. The sickness of fear in the room is such that men begin to crack up and weep, rising to their feet to shout hysterical praise, even love, for the leader. Inexorably, though, the cull continues, and faces and bodies go slack as their owners are pinioned and led away. When it is over, about half the committee members are left, moaning with relief and heaving with ardent love for the boss. (In an accompanying sequel, which I have not seen, they were apparently required to go into the yard outside and shoot the other half, thus sealing the pact with Saddam. I am not sure that even Beria or Himmler would have had the nerve and ingenuity and cruelty to come up with that.)

- 'I just... I was thinking of Achilles. It's our anniversarý tomorrow, and I'd really like to get him a present. Maybe I could sneak out tonight and be back in time for... for Patrick's visit tomorrow.' - 'Ohh, what are you going to get him?' Hell. This was torture in itself. - 'A new hammer. One with my name engraved on the side.' - Sure. why not? She sighed happily. - 'That's a cute idea!

I hate you. I hate you waking and sleeping; I hate you for undoing men’s souls, and for spoiling their lives; I hate you as the sworn enemy of the laughter of men.... Oh, it is God’s deadly enemy which I see, and hate, in you. In every one of your speeches you make a mockery of the Spirit, which you have silenced, and you forget that the private thought, the thought born in sorrow and loneliness, can be more deadly than all your implements of torture. You threaten all who oppose you with death, but you forget: our hatred is a deadly poison. It will creep into your blood, and we will die shouting with joy when our hate pulls you down with us into the depths.

I’ll rid the world of each one of you,” he whispered. “Every single one…

In a nutshell, the process they [abusers in a ritual abuse group] use on survivors is designed to: break the will and personality of the person until they become as nothing... with no will of their own...no identity...then they... rebuild the person & shape their will in order to...try and make the person one of them...thus gaining power If abusers hold all the power, becoming one of them can, for some, be the only means of survival. However, this doesn't always work, instead survivors often find ways of regaining their own power and fighting back.

I loved everyone who's been taken from me. So don't tell me when I'm allowed to break.

I'm not a woman and i'm not a man, i'm just a thing with breasts and a penis".

In 2004, Jacques Derrida said that a change was under way. Torture damages the inflicter as well as the inflicted. It’s no coincidence that one of the Abu Ghraib torturers came to the military directly from a job as a chicken processor. It might be slow, Derrida said, but eventually the spectacle of our abuse of animals will be intolerable to our sense of who we are.

In cases of distasteful occupation, the second day is generally worse than the first; we return to the rack with all the soreness of the preceding torture in our limbs.

In all bluefolk the immune system is quite advanced. A large number of relevant genes seem to be imported from the crocodile: those creatures live in stagnant, muddy water in much warmer climates, where they are exposed to many diseases and parasites. Wrestling with prey or each other, they may be wounded, but the dirty swamp water in the cut is mostly harmless. It was a very important acquisition by the Auravelus; it meant that virtually none of the old bioweapons were effective against them. More ordinary bluefolk could still suffer under a few recipes, but often no more than a rash. Chemical weapons had to be used instead. Infection or contamination through wounds was largely useless; our Asian friends determined that inhalation was a more viable route. Concoctions made against the lungs, as aerosols, were the most successful

Inescapable shock research continues to the present day. Although I am not a PETA person, I think it bears mentioning (again) that other species do not deliberately inflict uncontrollable, inescapable pain. Only humans do this — in the psych lab, in abusive families, in prisons, and in the extreme sadism of sexual psychopaths. Deliberate cruelty and the instrumental use of others is the sole province of homo sapiens.

In ten days’ time, the police only managed to set down two pages of legal transcripts. In brief, it was an unpleasant experience. I only think back on it when I piss and I notice the whitish scars that the electrodes left on my dick.

In some counties, there is an actual named crime of ritual abuse and there too, there have been convictions.

Is it that my habit of placing myself in the souls of other people makes me see myself as others see or would see me if they noticed my presence there? It is. And once I've perceived what they would feel about me if they knew me, it is as if they were feeling and expressing it at that very moment. It is a torture to me to live with other people. Then there are those who live inside me. Even when removed from life, I'm forced to live with them. Alone, I am hemmed in by multitudes. I have nowhere to flee to, unless I were to flee myself.

I remember that one Holy Week, the magazine I got every Thursday, Anteojito, came with a free poster depicting the Stations of the Cross. I burned the poster and flushed the ashes down the toilet to dispose of the evidence. The idea that I was supposed to pin this graphic depiction of torture and death on my wall seemed to me as obscene as if someone had suggested decorating my room with pictures of the inner workings of Auschwitz.

…is methodical abuse, often using indoctrination, aimed at breaking the will of another human being. In a 1989 report, the Ritual Abuse Task Force of the L.A. County Commission for Women defined ritual abuse as: “Ritual Abuse usually involves repeated abuse over an extended period of time. The physical abuse is severe, sometimes including torture and killing. The sexual abuse is usually painful,humiliating, intended as a means of gaining dominance over the victim.The psychological abuse is devastating and involves the use of ritual indoctrination. It includes mind control techniques which convey to the victim a profound terror of the cult members …most victims are in a state of terror, mind control and dissociation” (Pg. 35-36)

Isolation of catastrophic experiences. Dissociation may function to seal off overwhelming trauma into a compartmentalized area of conscious until the person is better able to integrate it into mainstream consciousness. The function of dissociation is particularly common in survivors of combat, political torture, or natural or transportation disasters.

I stood there, staring at the sleeping man snoring peacefully in my bed, unaware of the intrusion. I felt like a boy trying to steal the golden goose from under a giant’s nose. Any minute now, he would wake up and he would smell the scent of my fragrant flesh. I could kill him now, fuck the consequences. But it would mess everything up if I failed. Not just for me, but I felt in some ridiculous way, Ian's hopes were tied to me as well. Rho was already creating a life for himself. How much could he possibly care about the man he lost? Out of sight, out of mind. It was still the worst kind of betrayal, the one I got from Rho. My knight had stabbed my heart, left me to bleed out. And I was supposed to just act like nothing happened. Like it didn’t feel like dying, over and over. Like it wasn’t killing me. Just as I had nothing to hold me back, when I took this road with Rho, there was nothing holding me back now, without Rho, in this world so far away from him. Even if he didn't have a clue what was going on, it still hurt that he managed to find someone so quick. It wasn’t like him. But then again, maybe I put too much faith in the people who I loved so desperately.

The Dead Hand, yeah, it was, like, seminal, but tame by today’s standards. Violet, for instance, did not get her intestines ripped out. There wasn’t any torture, nobody’s liver got fried in a pan, there wasn’t any gang rape. So what’s the fun of that?

It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.

I try to keep in mind” I recite dryly as I run the front sight of my pistol over his face, “that my life is only as significant, as I am to the lives of others.” He’s sobbing and won’t look up from the floor so I lean close to his ear and ask softly, “Would you say that I’m significant to your life?

It's a good thing I'm not the president, because I would prosecute everybody who was involved in that torture, I would prosecute the people who did it, I would prosecute the people who ordered it and they would all go to jail! Because Torture is against the law!

It’s not torture. It’s ‘enhanced interrogation techniques.

It was well said—by Jean Tarrou in The Plague, I think—that attendance at lectures in an unknown language will help to hone one's awareness of the exceedingly slow passage of time. I once had the experience of being 'waterboarded' and can now dimly appreciate how much every second counts in the experience of the torture victim, forced to go on enduring what is unendurable.

Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where—as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen—even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their meetings. I still haven't submitted that expenses claim. The misgivings I had were of two types, both of them ineradicable. The first and the simplest was the encounter with everyday injustice: by all means the traffic cops were Jews but so, it turned out, were the colonists and ethnic cleansers and even the torturers. It was Jewish leftist friends who insisted that I go and see towns and villages under occupation, and sit down with Palestinian Arabs who were living under house arrest—if they were lucky—or who were squatting in the ruins of their demolished homes if they were less fortunate. In Ramallah I spent the day with the beguiling Raimonda Tawil, confined to her home for committing no known crime save that of expressing her opinions. (For some reason, what I most remember is a sudden exclamation from her very restrained and respectable husband, a manager of the local bank: 'I would prefer living under a Bedouin muktar to another day of Israeli rule!' He had obviously spent some time thinking about the most revolting possible Arab alternative.) In Jerusalem I visited the Tutungi family, who could produce title deeds going back generations but who were being evicted from their apartment in the old city to make way for an expansion of the Jewish quarter. Jerusalem: that place of blood since remote antiquity. Jerusalem, over which the British and French and Russians had fought a foul war in the Crimea, and in the mid-nineteenth century, on the matter of which Christian Church could command the keys to some 'holy sepulcher.' Jerusalem, where the anti-Semite Balfour had tried to bribe the Jews with the territory of another people in order to seduce them from Bolshevism and continue the diplomacy of the Great War. Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked. It certainly made a warped appeal to my sense of history.

Looking down these dreary passages, the dull repose and quiet that prevails, is awful. Occasionally, there is a drowsy sound from some lone weaver’s shuttle, or shoemaker’s last, but it is stifled by the thick walls and heavy dungeon-door, and only serves to make the general stillness more profound. Over the head and face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house, a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world, he is led to the cell from which he never again comes forth, until his whole term of imprisonment has expired….He is a man buried alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years…. And though he lives to be in the same cell ten weary years, he has no means of knowing, down to the very last hour, in what part of the building it is situated; what kind of men there are about him; whether in the long winter night there are living people near, or he is in some lonely corner of the great jail, with walls, and passages, and iron doors between him and the nearest sharer in its solitary horrors.

Many governments employ torture but this was the first time that the element of Saturnalia and pornography in the process had been made so clear to me. If you care to imagine what any inadequate or cruel man might do, given unlimited power over a woman, then anything that you can bring yourself to suspect was what became routine in ESMA, the Navy Mechanics School that became the headquarters of the business. I talked to Dr. Emilio Mignone, a distinguished physician whose daughter Monica had disappeared into the precincts of that hellish place. What do you find to say to a doctor and a humanitarian who has been gutted by the image of a starving rat being introduced to his daughter's genitalia? Like hell itself the school was endorsed and blessed by priests, in case any stray consciences needed to be stilled.

Men as Victims: Challenging Cultural Myths Judith Herman’s recent treatise on “complex PTSD" (Herman, 1992) is an extremely articulate and compelling analysis of some of the failings of the current PTSD diagnosis, and of some of the psychological legacies of prolonged, repeated trauma. However, there was one aspect of the article which concerned me and which I wish to address. Throughout the article, "Complex PTSD: A Syndrome in Survivors of Prolonged and Repeated Trauma," whenever reference is made by pronoun to perpetrators or "captors," the pronoun "he" or "him' is used. There are four such references. Whenever reference is made by pronoun to victims or survivors, the pronoun "her" or "she" is used. There are 11 such references. This is not simply an issue of the use of sexist language, which it is. By uniformly linking perpetration with males and victimhood with females, a misconception is perpetuated, one that is shared by the public and by mental health professionals. While there is evidence that most perpetrators of sexual abuse are male, and that there are more female victims of sexual abuse than male victims, it is not true that all perpetrators are male and all victims are female. In fact, in the article, some of the traumas from which Dr. Herman was deriving her argument—political torture, concentration camp survivors, for example—affect as many males as females. Even in the case of sexual abuse, there is increasing evidence that the sexual abuse of males is far more prevalent than has heretofore been believed. Research on male sexual victimization lags more than a decade behind that of female victimization, but several recent studies have reported prevalence rates near or above 20% (Finkelhor et at, 1990; Urquiza, 1988, cited in Urquiza and Keating, 1990; Lisak and Luster, 1992).

Mind control is built on lies and manipulation of attachment needs. Valerie Sinason, (Forward)

My doppelganger wraps the ear in a handkerchief and shoves it into his pocket as he leaves the train with a nod of his head in my direction.” William Wilson in the short story 'Metro' by Steen Langstrup