Quotes About Infliction

Whatever fears, whatever sense of vulnerability may underlie such behavior, it also comes out of entitlement, the entitlement to inflict suffering and even death on other people. It breeds misery in the perpetrator and the victims. (The Longest War)

Fear: what did those who inflicted it know? They knew that it worked, even how it worked, but not what it felt like. 'The wolf cannot speak of the fear of the sheep,' as they say.

The greater part of violence that humans have inflicted on each other is not the work of criminals or the mentally deranged, but of normal, respectable citizens in the service of the collective ego.

The Thing about people who wanted to show you things was that sometimes their interest in granting you knowledge was laced with a little voyeuristic sadism. They were waiting for the Look or the Reaction, and they didn't care what it was so long as it inflicted some kind of discomfort.

Physical pain always mimes death and the infliction of physical pain is always a mock execution.

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists - that is why they invented hell.

Governments like it that way. They want their people to see war as a drama of opposites, good and evil, "them" and "us," victory or defeat. But war is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit.

It is in the very nature of things that torments inflicted have no tendency to bring a wicked man to repentance. Then why torment him if it will not do him good? It is simply unadulterated revenge. All the punishment in the world will not reform a man, unless he knows that he who inflicts it upon him does it for the sake of reformation, and really and truly loves him, and has his good at heart.

There can be no law of nature, no science, No aberrant infliction of human willThat unchained the soul cannot conquer, Simply sweep away, should it chose to.

In 1984 the lust for power is satisfied by inflicting pain; in Brave New World, by inflicting a hardly less humiliating pleasure.

The principle inherent in the clause that prohibits pointless infliction of excessive punishment when less severe punishment can adequately achieve the same purposes invalidates the punishment.

I think you have to remember that Americans saw their purpose as so innately good that they could excuse the pain they would inflict on others to carry out those purposes. Because the purposes were so good, they would justify this pain we were inflicting on other people.

Violence must be inflicted once for all, people will then forget what it tastes like and so be less resentful.

In the gap between desire and enactment, noun and verb, intention and infliction, want and have, compassion begins.

It seems we must be taken twice, by the love that we inflict and then by the infliction of being loved, before we have the humility to look and take whatever agreeable plant that we have never seen before, because of it being all around our feet, and take it and watch it grow, choosing the lesser truth because it's all that we'll ever know.

How bitter is lovelessness both to suffer and to inflict. More than anything I have dreaded the despair of its remembrance and the threat of its repeat.

T]he infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

Truth cannot be imparted, it must be inflicted.

Working homicide for so many years, Bosch could not be surprised anymore by the horrors people inflicted on each other. But the horrors people saved for themselves were a different story.

And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us.

There is no limit to suffering human beings have been willing to inflict on others, no matter how innocent, no matter how young, and no matter how old. This fact must lead all reasonable human beings, that is, all human beings who take evidence seriously, to draw only one possible conclusion: Human nature is not basically good.

Inflicting emotional distress has typically been treated as a civil action. How 'substantial' does the distress have to be for it to turn criminal?

Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape.

My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this—and I have, countless times, in just about every act I've committed—and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding