Torture Quotes - Page 17

• Civil society has not lost the possibility to influence the government and force them to change their policy. That is why we believe in your voice and your help.

  Lidia Yusupova

  Believe, Government, Voice

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• The United States was founded on the idea that all people are endowed with inalienable rights, and that principle has allowed us to work to perfect our union at home while standing as a beacon of hope to the world. Today, that principle is embodied in agreements Americans helped forge - the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, and treaties against torture and genocide - and it unites us with people from every country and culture.

  Barack Obama

  Country, Home, Rights

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• We applied a very simple principle: Recognize the facts. Abortion is old as the world. Gay marriage, please - it's older than the world. We had Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, please. To say it's modern, come on, it's older than we are. It's an objective reality that it exists. For us, not legalizing it would be to torture people needlessly.

  Jose Mujica

  Powerful, Humble, Gay

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• The doctrine of eternal punishment is in perfect harmony with the savagery of the men who made the orthodox creeds. It is in harmony with torture, with flaying alive, and with burnings.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Men, Perfect, Doctrine

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The Works of Robert G.Ingersoll. [Dresden Ed.]”

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• Death is not as terrible as you think. It comes to you as a healer. Sleep is nothing but a counterfeit death. What happens in death we can picture in sleep. All our sufferings vanish in sleep. When death comes, all our mortal tortures cease; they cannot go beyond the portals of death.

  Paramahansa Yogananda

  Death, Sleep, Thinking

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• But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

  Ayn Rand

  Life, Frustration, Men

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.212, Penguin

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• ... the United States, for generations, has sustained two parallel but opposed states of mind about military atrocities and human rights: one of U.S. benevolence, generally held by the public, and the other of ends-justify-the-means brutality sponsored by counterinsurgency specialists. Normally the specialists carry out their actions in remote locations with little notice in the national press. That allows the public to sustain its faith in a just America, while hard-nosed security and economic interests are still protected in secret.

  Robert Parry

  Military, War, Mean

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• A successful current affairs television show seems to be more and more a cross between a music hall turn and a scene in a torture chamber.

  Harold MacMillan

  Successful, Political, Television

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• Remember one very fundamental thing about life: Any experience that has not been lived will hang around you, will persist: "Finish me! Live me! Complete me!" There is an intrinsic quality in every experience that it tends and wants to be finished, completed. Once completed, it evaporates; incomplete, it persists, it tortures you, it haunts you, it attracts your attention. It says, "What are you going to do about me? I am still incomplete - fulfill me!"

  Rajneesh

  Inspirational, Life, Wise

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• All this happiness on display is suspect... If they think - and they could be right - that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they should be sombre in their view.

  Ian Mcewan

  Thinking, Views, Political

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• Do people believe in human rights because such rights actually exist, like mathematical truths, sitting on a cosmic shelf next to the Pythagorean theorem just waiting to be discovered by Platonic reasoners? Or do people feel revulsion and sympathy when they read accounts of torture, and then invent a story about universal rights to help justify their feelings?

  Jonathan Haidt

  Believe, Pythagorean Theorem, Rights

  Jonathan Haidt (2012). “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion”, p.32, Vintage

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• To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.

  Stanislaw Lem

  Men, Pleasure, Knows

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• Not all the Americans in Iraq are those who torture and murder, or course they're not, I don't know how many are doing it, I know it is systematic throughout the United States military I think that's been revealed.

  John Pilger

  Military, Thinking, Iraq

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• I want to remind priests that the confessional must not be a torture chamber but rather an encounter with the Lord’s mercy which spurs us on to do our best. A small step, in the midst of great human limitations, can be more pleasing to God than a life which appears outwardly in order but moves through the day without confronting great difficulties. Everyone needs to be touched by the comfort and attraction of God’s saving love, which is mysteriously at work in each person, above and beyond their faults and failings.

  Pope Francis

  Moving, Order, Small Steps

  Pope Francis (2014). “The Joy of the Gospel”, p.17, BookBaby

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• The racist dog policemen must withdraw immediately from our communities, cease their wanton murder and brutality and torture of black people, or face the wrath of the armed people.

  Huey Newton

  Dog, Wrath, People

  Huey P Newton (2011). “The Huey P. Newton Reader”, p.149, Seven Stories Press

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• It should be forbidden and severely punished to remove cancer by cutting, burning, cautery, and other fiendish tortures. It is from nature that the disease comes, and from nature comes the cure, not from physicians.

  Paracelsus

  Cancer, Cutting, Burning

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• Everybody says they're opposed to torture. But everyone would do it personally if they knew it could save the life of a kidnapped child who had only two hours of oxygen left before death. And it would be the right thing to do.

  Alan Dershowitz

  Children, Oxygen, Two

  "Does torture work?" by Martin Robbins, www.theguardian.com. November 4, 2010.

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• The sickness rolled through me in great waves. After each wave it would fade away and leave me limp as a wet leaf and shivering all over and then I would feel it rising up in me again, and the glittering white torture chamber tiles under my feet and over my head and all four sides closed in and squeezed me to pieces.

  Sylvia Plath

  White, Rising Up, Feet

  Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.25, Hamilton Books

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• No, Father, I've a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.

  Albert Camus

  Children, Father, Ideas

  ALBERT CAMUS (1971). “NOBEL PRIZE LIBRARY”

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• The truth is I am inventing the maybe. I can only make the choices I make, so why torture myself with what I might have done, when all I can handle is what I have done? The Maybe Islands are hostile to human life.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Islands, Choices, Done

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• Teach music and singing at school in such a way that it is not a torture but a joy for the pupil; instill a thirst for finer music in him, a thirst which will last for a lifetime.

  Zoltan Kodaly

  School, Joy, Singing

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• You have to question a cinematic culture that preaches artistic expression, and yet would support a decision that is clearly a product of a patriarchy-dominant society, which tries to control how women are depicted on screen. The MPAA is okay supporting scenes that portray women in scenarios of sexual torture and violence for entertainment purposes, but they are trying to force us to look away from a scene that shows a woman in a sexual scenario, which is both complicit and complex. It's misogynistic in nature to try and control a woman's sexual presentation of self.

  Ryan Gosling

  Self, Expression, Support

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• Torture presupposes, it requires, it craves the abrogation of our capacity to imagine others suffering, dehumanizing them so much that their pain is not our pain. It demands this of the torturer, placing the victim outside and beyond any form of compassion or empathy, but also demands of everyone else the same distancing, the same numbness.

  Ariel Dorfman

  Pain, Compassion, Numbness

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• Christianity did not come with tidings of great joy, but with a message of eternal grief. It came with the threat of everlasting torture on its lips. It meant war on earth and perdition hereafter.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  War, Grief, Joy

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.2217, Library of Alexandria

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• 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.

  George Etherege

  Passion, Violent, Endure

  'The Man of Mode' (1676) act 2, sc. 2

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