Quotes About Torture

The point of the exercise [torture] was getting prisoners to do irreparable damage to that part of themselves that believed in helping others above all else, that part of themselves that made them activists, replacing it with shame and humiliation.

the authors of the CIA manual, that effective torture was not sadism but science. "The precise pain in the precise place, in the precise amount" was his motto.

That is what makes the Bush regime different: after the attacks of September 11, it dared to demand the right to torture without shame. That left the administration subject to criminal prosecution—a problem it dealt with by changing the laws.

At the same time, I heard from a cousin that my elderly relative was in a nursing home, but, 'because of COVID,' her family was not allowed to see her ... A sociable woman with many grandchildren who loved her, this isolation seemed like it would be a form of torture for her.

What can I possibly have in common with perpetrators of murder and torture?" It is much more reassuring to believe that they are evil and be done with them.14 We dare not let a glimmer of their humanity in the door, because it might force us to face the haunting truth of cartoonist Walt Kelly's great character Pogo, who famously said: "We have met the enemy and he is us.

An Austrian philosopher named Jean Améry, tortured by the Gestapo because of his activity with the Belgian resistance and then deported to Auschwitz because he was a Jew, wrote that anyone who has been tortured remains forever tortured and can never again be at ease in the world. One's faith in humanity is broken and can never be acquired again.

You simply mean that you flirted outrageously with him, poor old chap, and then repented, and to make reparation, married him, though you tortured yourself to death by doing it.

The exposition of Atrocious Torture Instruments could not fail to appeal to a connoisseur of the worst in mankind. But the essence of the worst, the true asafoetida of the human spirit, is not found in the Iron Maiden or the whetted edge; Elemental Ugliness is found in the faces of the crowd.

Where shall I turn, what shall I do?' are the voices of people grieving. Idleness is torture. In all times and places, nature abhors a vacuum.

Where shall I turn, what shall I do? are the voices of people grieving. Idleness is torture. In all times and places, nature abhors a vacuum.

Meanwhile, back in the torture room, the cardinal is now being forced to bleed into a chalice and consecrate his own blood, not to God, but to Satan. They also cut off his big toe, and he is made to hold it up like a Host and say, This is my body, the keenwitted Angelo observing that it's the first time he's told anything like the truth in fifty years of systematic lying.

I know about the torture and assassination, Detective Galiano. That's why I'm in Guatemala.

Because despite the torture he'd been put through, the pain and loss he did not believe he had done anything to deserve, he had tried to be a decent person, tried to stay within the confines of morality. And all it had gotten him was more suffering.

In the interview, Roger reflected how the German philosopher Nietzsche said a man can undergo torture if he knows the why of his life. But I, here at Dachau, learned something far greater. I learned to know the Who of my life. He was enough to sustain me then, and is enough to sustain me still

REPORTER: Thank you, sir. A simple question. GEORGE W. BUSH: Yes. It may require a simple answer. REPORTER: What's your definition of the word "torture"? GEORGE W. BUSH: Of what? REPORTER: The word "torture." What's your definition? GEORGE W. BUSH: That's defined in U.S. law, and we don't torture. REPORTER: Can you give me your version of it, sir? GEORGE W. BUSH: Whatever the law says.

Revenge is as the tigers spring, Deadly, and quick, and crushing; yet, as real Torture is theirs, what they inflict they feel.

Physical pain will never compare to mental anguish.

She liked him, so she was torturing him. Her Grace in a nutshell.

I'm going to find whoever put this creature through that torture, and I'm going to kill them slowly. Piece by piece.

Yes, I do. The last time we met, he tortured me," Ascanio said. He what? Could this get any worse? "You're still alive," Hugh said. "Clearly my heart wasn't in it.

I just want to serve and help people and be good to everybody, only it always goes wrong somehow—I think about suicide all the time, every bloody day I want to die and stop this torture, but I go crawling on . . . I'm so Christ-awful bloody lonely I could scream with it for hours on end.

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

You can't imagine what it's like when every moment you're conscious you're in the most frightful pain.

How strange that behind a smiling chattering mask one may rehearse in the utmost detail pictures and conversations which constitute torture, that behind that mask one may weep, one may howl.