Quotes About Torture

By comparison, at the same time that the Mongols were moving to limit the use of torture, both church and state in Europe passed laws to expand its usage to an ever greater variety of crimes for which there need be no evidence.

Now they're really amused, and burst into laughter. Someone tries a variation while still clapping hands: 'Clipped prick… clipped prick.' Whereupon they begin alternating while clapping their hands: 'Jew… Clipped prick… Jew… Clipped prick.' It seems they're no longer angry, merely having a good time. I keep bouncing in the chair and moaning as the electric shocks penetrate [....]

Now—now, of course, I see something very beautiful in those days, which were such torture then. I felt, then, that Giovanni was dragging me with him to the bottom of the sea.

That body suddenly seemed the black opening of a cavern in which I would be tortured till madness came, in which I would lose my manhood. Precisely, I wanted to know that mystery and feel that power and have that promise fulfilled through me.

Kill, torture, burn! Just so long as it's in the name of God, you're all right. What a lot of hypocrisy! Don't give me faith! It's nothing!

But love is different for every person. For some it's hate, for some it's joy, for some it's fear, for some it's jealousy, for some it's torture, for some it's peace. For some it's everything.

If you condemn someone who has committed a crime to be tortured, that would be unconstitutional.

Torture can destroy the social fabric of communities, degrade a society's institutions, and undermine the integrity of its political systems.

Obama had the audacity to say, 'I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States.' Ladies and gentlemen, torture in the United States has always been illegal.

Your thoughts can torture you-but not the dead. They've moved on.

One man's magic is another man's gluey torture session.

Of all parties I now see only one party- The Anarchist- which respects human life, and loudly insists upon the abolition of capital punishment, prison torture and punishment of man by man altogether.

I admired my father very much... at the age of sixteen. But now I see that he was a brutal and cruel man, - but not without remorse, and that was what tortured us, his alternations.

There is torture of mind as well as body; the will is as much affected by fear as by force. And there comes a point where this Court should not be ignorant as judges of what we know as men.

People associated their emperor with a scale of horror fully comparable with Auschwitz – and perhaps worse. They.,were prepared to believe that living men and women nailed to posts,'•soaked in oil and set on fire were used to light a party, because the public enjoyment of torture was part of the fabric of their state. Death screams were part of the fun.

Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.

Is it only in the army in the Philippines that Americans sometimes commit deeds that cause all other Americans to regret? [Theodore Roosevelt 1901 relating reports of water torture in the Philippines to lynching in the south]

Things like Abu Ghraib and even Guantanamo are not new things: there are many precedents.

I've come to believe that the function of torture in our society is not about getting information, in spite of what we might want to believe. It is merely about power. It tells the world that there is now no limit to what we will do when we feel threatened.

They were panting dwarfs, imps gasping for breath, and their beards dragged along the ground. Each carried a strange implement of torture. Some held bloody leather belts studded with iron, some clasp knives and ox goads, some thick, wide-headed nails. Three midgets whose behinds nearly scraped the ground carried a massive, unwieldy cross; and last of all came the vilest of the lot, a cross-eyed pygmy holding a crown of thorns.

So we know that human nature, and that includes our nature, yours and mine, can very easily turn people into quite efficient torturers and mass-murderers and slave-drivers...To the extent that the statement is true, and there is such an extent, it's just not relevant: human nature also has the capacity to lead to selflessness, and cooperation, and sacrifice, and support, and solidarity, and tremendous courage, and lots of other things too.

What the Obama [ban on torture] ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system's torture, which is done by foreigners under US patronage. Obama could stop backing foreign forces that torture, but he has chosen not to do so.

from 1960—remember the date—from 1960 to "the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and East European satellites.

Just for the record, she still loves you. She wouldn't bother to torture you if she didn't.