Best 238 quotes in «torture quotes» category

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

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

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

I sometimes think that theatre is a torture.

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

Jazz: Music invented for the torture of imbeciles.

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

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

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.

No one can do everything, but everyone can do something

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

The torture of being the unseen object, and the constantly observed subject.

Rolling torture wagons for nature's most dignified creature.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily.

All across the hexarchate were people like his older sister: loyal citizens, decent people in their day to day lives, many of whom had benefited even from a system that ran on regular ritualized torture.

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

A cult is a group of people who share an obsessive devotion to a person or idea. The cults described in this book use violent tactics to recruit, indoctrinate, and keep members. Ritual abuse is defined as the emotionally, physically, and sexually abusive acts performed by violent cults. Most violent cults do not openly express their beliefs and practices, and they tend to live separately in noncommunal environments to avoid detection. Some victims of ritual abuse are children abused outside the home by nonfamily members, in public settings such as day care. Other victims are children and teenagers who are forced by their parents to witness and participate in violent rituals. Adult ritual abuse victims often include these grown children who were forced from childhood to be a member of the group. Other adult and teenage victims are people who unknowingly joined social groups or organizations that slowly manipulated and blackmailed them into becoming permanent members of the group. All cases of ritual abuse, no matter what the age of the victim, involve intense physical and emotional trauma. Violent cults may sacrifice humans and animals as part of religious rituals. They use torture to silence victims and other unwilling participants. Ritual abuse victims say they are degraded and humiliated and are often forced to torture, kill, and sexually violate other helpless victims. The purpose of the ritual abuse is usually indoctrination. The cults intend to destroy these victims' free will by undermining their sense of safety in the world and by forcing them to hurt others. In the last ten years, a number of people have been convicted on sexual abuse charges in cases where the abused children had reported elements of ritual child abuse. These children described being raped by groups of adults who wore costumes or masks and said they were forced to witness religious-type rituals in which animals and humans were tortured or killed. In one case, the defense introduced in court photographs of the children being abused by the defendants[.1] In another case, the police found tunnels etched with crosses and pentacles along with stone altars and candles in a cemetery where abuse had been reported. The defendants in this case pleaded guilty to charges of incest, cruelty, and indecent assault.[2] Ritual abuse allegations have been made in England, the United States, and Canada.[3] Many myths abound concerning the parents and children who report ritual abuse. Some people suggest that the tales of ritual abuse are "mass hysteria." They say the parents of these children who report ritual abuse are often overly zealous Christians on a "witch-hunt" to persecute satanists. These skeptics say the parents are fearful of satanism, and they use their knowledge of the Black Mass (a historically well-known, sexualized ritual in which animals and humans are sacrificed) to brainwash their children into saying they were abused by satanists.[4] In 1992 I conducted a study to separate fact from fiction in regard to the disclosures of children who report ritual abuse.[5] The study was conducted through Believe the Children, a national organization that provides support and educational sources for ritual abuse survivors and their families.

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.

All you have to do is tell me where the girl with the pointed ears is being held, and you walk free. She was taken yesterday near the Boneyard, and I know you know where she is. Tell me, and you walk.” The man licked his lips, and replied, “And if I don’t tell you?” “I will burn you alive right here, go take another member of your gang, and make him the same offer while he sits chained next to your smoldering remains.

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

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

Apparently, after 20 minutes of waterboarding, not only will you admit allegiance to Osama bin Laden, you’ll gladly die just to have relief.

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.

—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.

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.

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

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

Bad memories were hard enough, but it was torture to be haunted by the good.

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 oh — time has become such a torture, a slow torture. One tries to capture a piece of time that lies ahead and is full of light . . . but thinking about that just makes this awful black time even blacker.

As to Science, she has never sought to ally herself to civil power. She has never attempted to throw odium or inflict social ruin on any human being. She has never subjected anyone to mental torment, physical torture, least of all to death, for the purpose of upholding or promoting her ideas. She presents herself unstained by cruelties and crimes. But in the Vatican—we have only to recall the Inquisition—the hands that are now raised in appeals to the 'Most Merciful' are crimsoned. They have been steeped in blood!

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

By the time Cheryl Hersha came to the facility, knowledge of multiple personality was so complete that doctors understood how the mind separated into distinct ego states, each unaware of the other. First, the person traumatized had to be both extremely intelligent and under the age of seven, two conditions not yet understood though remaining consistent as factors. The trauma was almost always of a sexual nature… (p52)

By those who get a kick out of this sort of thing (and they are very numerous) inhumanity is enjoyed for its own sake, but often, nonetheless, with a bad conscience. To allay their sense of guilt, the bullies and the sadists provide themselves with a creditable excuses for their favorite sport. Thus, brutality toward children is rationalized as discipline, as obedience to the Word of God - "he that spareth the rod, hateth his son". Brutality toward criminals is a corollary of the Categorical Imperative. Brutality toward religious or political heretics is a blow for the True Faith. Brutality toward members of an alien race is justified by arguments drawn from what may once have passed for Science. Once universal, brutality toward the insane is not yet extinct - the mad are horribly exasperating. But this brutality is no longer rationalized, as it was in the past, in theological terms. The people who tormented Surin and the other victims of hysteria or psychosis did so, first, because they enjoyed being brutal and, second, because they were convinced that they did well to be brutal. And they believed that they did well, because, ex hypthesi, the mad had always brought their own troubles upon themselves. For some manifest or obscure sin, they were being punished by God, who permitted devils to besiege or obsess them. Both as God's enemies and as temporary incarnations of radical evil, they deserved the be maltreated. And maltreated they were - with a a good conscience and a heart-warming sense that the divine will was being done on earth, as in heaven.

Daisy, you’re too damned innocent to understand the danger you’re in. It’s taking all the self-control I’ve got to keep my hands off you. Don’t play games with me, sweetheart. It’s too easy for you to torture me, and I’m at my limit.

Confusion: the bastard half brother of chaos. Chaos: the torture instrument of forgetting.