Torture Quotes - Page 19

• Torture is not torture when there’s any hope of relief.

  Tahereh Mafi

  Relief

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• When you have to get into the character each morning, give it your voice, your face, it was torture.

  Victoria Abril

  Morning, Character, Voice

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

  B. Traven

  Yesterday, People, Today

  B. Traven (1980). “The treasures of B. Traven”, Jonathan Cape

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• The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.

  Alain de Botton

  Hands, Telephones, Beloved

  Alain de Botton (2015). “On Love: A Novel”, p.20, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• We say, and we say openly, and while ye torture us, mangled and gory we cry out, "We worship God through Christ!" Believe Him a man: it is through Him and in Him that God willeth Himself to be known and worshipped.

  Tertullian

  Believe, Men, Belief

  Tertullian (1842). “Apologetic and Practical Treatises”, p.52

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• Get arrested. Destroy the property of those who torture animals. Liberate those animals interned in the hellholes our society tolerates.

  Jerry Vlasak

  Animal, Our Society, Tolerate

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• I saw the various museum displays including scenes of torture while feeling heartfelt remorse and sorrow over the great pain and suffering inflicted on South Koreans by Japan's colonial rule.

  Junichiro Koizumi

  Pain, Museums, Japan

  "Koizumi: 'Heartfelt remorse' for Korean suffering" By Sohn Jie-Ae, www.cnn.com. October 15, 2001.

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• The United States is now relearning an ancient lesson, dating back to the Roman Empire. Brutalizing an enemy only serves to brutalize the army ordered to do it. Torture corrodes the mind of the torturer.

  James Risen

  Army, Dating, Mind

  James Risen (2014). “Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War”, p.165, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Regrettably, it has become clear that torture of detainees in United States custody is not limited to Abu Ghraib or even Iraq. Since Abu Ghraib, there have been increasing reports of torture.

  Marty Meehan

  Iraq, United States, Custody

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• If I can't enjoy the full and total happiness of love, then I want to drain its torments, its tortures to the dregs; then I want the woman I love to mistreat me, betray me, and the more cruelly the better. That too is a pleasure.

  Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

  Want, Pleasure, Drains

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• From his style, you’d think Jason Brannon was the dark double of Ray Bradbury. He cares more about character and realism than most writers I’ve read and his plots flow like well-orchestrated music. Indeed, Brannon’s writing has a classical feel, reminiscent of the best traditional work in the genre, even when he’s going for gut-wrenching terror and torture in-extremis.

  Michael Arnzen

  Character, Writing, Dark

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• Diets are based on the unspoken fear that you are a madwoman, a food terrorist, a lunatic…The promise of a diet is not only that you will have a different body; it is that in having a different body, you will have a different life. If you hate yourself enough, you will love yourself. If you torture yourself enough, you will become a peaceful, relaxed human being.

  Geneen Roth

  Hate, Love You, Peaceful

  Geneen Roth (2011). “Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything”, p.73, Simon and Schuster

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• And I've known people who came out with a sense of torture.

  George Weinberg

  People, Known

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• The aim of torture is to destroy a person as a human being, to destroy their identity and soul. It is more evil than murder.

  Inge Genefke

  Evil, Soul, Identity

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• The quotes are often poignant or funny (one man before the firing squad requests a bulletproof vest) and often don't register as much more than interesting historical documents from centuries past. But read in aggregate, all that pain piles up. Essentially, Elder has amassed a collection of what people say when they know they are going to die, the final product of what could be seen as psychological torture.

  Jonathan Messinger

  Pain, Past, Men

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• Guilt is cancer. Guilt will confine you, torture you, destroy you as an artist. It's a black wall. It's a thief.

  Dave Grohl

  Wall, Cancer, Artist

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• Beyond my desire to boycott the torture factories, I am also way happier when I eat a plant-based diet, and I feel about a thousand times more energetic.

  Olivia Wilde

  Animal, Desire, Way

  "Olivia Wilde Named PETA's Sexiest Vegetarian of 2010", www.mtv.com. July 01, 2010.

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• We torture and kill two billion sentient living beings every week. 10,000 entire species are wiped out every year because of the actions of one, and we are now facing the sixth mass extinction in cosmological history. If any other organism did this, a biologist would consider them a virus.

  Philip Wollen

  Animal, Mass Extinction, Years

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• The abused child goes on living within those who have survived such torture, a torture that ended with total repression. They live with the darkness of fear, oppression, and threats. When all its attempts to move the adult to heed its story have failed, it resorts to the language of symptoms to make itself heard. Enter addiction, psychosis, criminality.

  Alice Miller

  Children, Moving, Psychosis

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• Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it.

  Don Roff

  Expectations, Trying, Sometimes

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• 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.

  Albert Maltz

  Gestapo, Victim, Informers

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• A prisoner in the Inquisition is never allowed to see the face of his accuser, or of the witnesses against him, but every method is taken by threats and tortures, to oblige him to accuse himself, and by that means corroborate their evidence.

  John Foxe

  Taken, Mean, Faces

  John Foxe, William Byron Forbush (2004). “Foxe's Book of Martyrs”, p.79, Hendrickson Publishers

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

  Jackie Earle Haley

  Men, Engineering, Magic

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• There is no trick of a magician or spell of a witch doctor, no drug or mesmerism or bribery or torture or coercion that can compare in power with the force for change unleashed in the human breast through the touch of love.

  Mike Mason

  Doctors, Drug, Coercion

  Mike Mason (1985). “Mystery of Marriage: Meditations on the Miracle”, Multnomah

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• Acknowledgment of torture is not accountability for it.

  Yousef Munayyer

  Accountability, Acknowledgment

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