Best 238 quotes in «torture quotes» category

You give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders." (Larry King Live, May 11, 2009)

All punishments by which the human body might be maimed are barbarbarism.

Evidence from torture may be considered completely untrustworthy

And because of our selfishness, we will be condemned to the worst torture humankind ever invented for itself: loneliness.

Expect to feel pleasure. Knowledge is sexy. Expect to feel pain. Knowledge is torture.

Because animals are property, we consider as "humane treatment" that we would regard as torture if it were inflicted on humans.

Everything is vain and tortures the spirit instead of calming and satisfying it.

I sometimes think that theatre is a torture.

I must go deeper and even stronger into my treasure mine and stint nothing of time, toil, or torture.

It'll be your own torture," he said, serious. "I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.

I think if you're looking for a pure expression of evil, torture is pretty - is a pretty good candidate.

It is the policy of the United States not to engage in torture, and there are federal criminal laws that prohibit torture.

It's the boredom that kills you. You read until you're tired of that. You do crossword puzzles until you're tired of that. This is torture. This is mental torture.

I would suffer all the humiliation, all the torture, the absolute ostracism and even death, to prevent violence

Thinking is the greatest torture in the world for most people.

John Kerry gave the enemy for free what I and many of my comrades in North Vietnam in the prison camps took torture to avoid saying.

Mr. Solomon was right the worst kind of torture is watching someone you love get hurt.

No one can do everything, but everyone can do something

Nothing says you care for me better than offering to torture my enemies.

The confessional is not a torture chamber, but the place in which the Lord's mercy motivates us to do better.

The deplorable thing is that the people who were tortured yesterday, torture today.

Jazz: Music invented for the torture of imbeciles.

Reality is never as bad as a nightmare, as the mental tortures we inflict on ourselves.

Rolling torture wagons for nature's most dignified creature.

Sitting and waiting for something to happen was the worst kind of torture.

To live without you, only that would be torture." "A day alone, only that would be death.

This is not to condone torture, which is still prohibited by the Torture Convention and federal criminal law.

To put the point sharply: If an informer in the French underground who sent a friend to the torture chambers of the Gestapo was equally a victim, then there can be no right or wrong in life that I understand.

To suggest that God specifically created a worm to torture small African children is blasphemy as far as I can see. The Archbishop of Canterbury doesn't believe that.

We must all die. But that I can save him from days of torture, that is what I feel as my great and ever new privilege. Pain is a more terrible lord of mankind than even death itself.

When love grows diseased, the best thing we can do is to put it to a violent death. I cannot endure the torture of a lingering and consumptive passion.

With torture ,as with making love, foreplay is the all important factor

You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily.

You run on the treadmill. But you need to stop watching The Food Network when you're doing it. That is how you torture yourself.

A central part of the torturer’s craft is to make his job easier by stripping the victim of protective dignity.

A familiar sensation sparks inside me, the one I had a few years ago, the one that hurts because it’s dangerous and overwhelming. Knowing how it is to truly love someone is torturous. You try to bury that feeling. So you become lonely, deprived, and when you sense anything remotely like it, the emotion comes back to haunt you. It’s one sick fucking game.

—And what's so bad about being soft like a woman? Why is it men or whoever, some poor bastard, some queen, can't be sensitive, too, if he's got a mind to? —I don't know, but sometimes that kind of behavior can get in a man's way. —When? When it comes to torturing?” —No, when it comes to being finished with the torturers.” —But if men acted like women there wouldn't be anymore torturers.

Anyone even remotely suspect was interrogated, because interrogation is by far the most effective method of speedily banishing inappropriate thoughts from the mind.

A range of reasons to go with a range of individuals, my dear: some wish to restore lost glories, some wish to alter the status quo, some wish to bring harm to others. In my case I do it for the most personal of reasons - because I like it and because I can.

As far as he could discover, there were no signs of spring. The decay that covered the surface of the mottled ground was not the kind in which life generates. Last year, he remembered, May had failed to quicken these soiled fields. It had taken all the brutality of July to torture a few green spikes through the exhausted dirt. What the little park needed, even more than he did, was a drink. Neither alcohol nor rain would do. Tomorrow, in his column, he would ask Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Desperate, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband and the rest of his correspondents to come here and water the soil with their tears. Flowers would then spring up, flowers that smelled of feet. "Ah, humanity..." But he was heavy with shadow and the joke went into a dying fall. He trist to break its fall by laughing at himself.

Ask very pointed questions. Sharp as sword blades, or laser blasts, if you catch my meaning.

At one point Malkin and one of his colleagues took Eichmann to the toilet. They waited outside. After a few minutes, Eichmann called out to Malkin, ‘Darf ich anfangen?’ (‘May I begin?’) Only when told yes did he begin to move his bowels. The Eichmann Trial, page 17

At this point, I realize: He is making a monster of me.

Being humiliated only makes it easier to restrain you. And being restrained makes it possible to torture you, for the unrestrained cannot be tortured; the unrestrained can only be fought. So to be restrained is to be unable to fight, and to be humiliated is to be readied for torture. To know you have been readied for torture is to await torture. And to await torture is, itself, torture.

But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.

Death was not the scariest thing out there; no, the denial of it could be far worse.

Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome. The better and more realistic test would therefore seem to be: In what cause, or on what principle, would you risk your life?

For, or so they whispered, she would take the camp-stool and draw it up close below the face of the man or woman that hung down over the edge of the interrogation table. Then she would squat down on the stool and and look into the face and quietly say 'No. 1' or 'No. 10' or 'No. 25' and the inquisitors would know what she meant and they would begin. And she would watch the eyes in the face a few inches away from hers and breathe in the screams as if they were perfume.

Funny, isn’t it? No matter what language they speak, everyone sounds the same when you pull out their fingernails.” – Dread Emperor Foul III, “the Linguist

Godless, cruel, infamous tyrant, are you not ashamed to despoil a woman of that by which your own mother nursed you?