Torture Quotes - Page 20

• The United States does not torture.

  George W. Bush

  United States, Doe, States

  Speech on Military Commissions to Try Suspected Terrorists, delivered 6 September 2006, White House, Washington, D.C.

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• Oh, you ask me, what is the greatest torture of a person who does portraits for a living? I could fill several volumes with nice nasty stories. I don't know.

  Imogen Cunningham

  Nice, Portraits, Doe

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• The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe... All is registered in the 'boundless heart' of the bodhisattva. Through our deepest and innermost reponses to our world - to hunger and torture and the threat of annihilation - we touch that boundless heart.

  Joanna Macy

  Heart, Our World, Soul

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• For those for whom the sex act has come to seem mechanical and merely the meeting and manipulation of body parts, there often remains a hunger which can be called metaphysical but which is not recognized as such, and which seeks satisfaction in physical danger, or sometimes in torture, suicide, or murder.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Suicide, Sex, Body

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• Instead of using this space to pretend the newly released CIA 'torture' report confirms that the United States is the most evil nation in the history of the universe, I'm going to address Jonathan Gruber's confirmation that he believes we're all stupid.

  David Limbaugh

  Stupid, Believe, Space

  David Limbaugh “The Left's Assault on the American Idea”, Creators Publishing

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• O joy of suffering! To struggle against great odds! to meet enemies undaunted! To be entirely alone with them! to find how much one can stand! To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium, death, face to face! To mount the scaffold! to advance to the muzzles of guns with perfect nonchalance! To be indeed a God!

  Walt Whitman

  Death, Struggle, Gun

  Walt Whitman (1870). “Passage to India”, p.51, Haskell House Pub Limited

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• When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of those gyms their scary-looking gym equipment, and they're going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture.

  Douglas Coupland

  California, Scary, Culture

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• ...I couldn't but surmise that the devil, looking at the cruel wars that Christianity has occasioned, the persecutions, the tortures Christian has inflicted on Christian, the unkindness, the hypocracy, the intolerance, must consider the balance sheet with complacency. And when he remembers that it has laid upon mankind the bitter burden of the sense of sin that has darkened the beauty of the starry night and cast a baleful shadow on the passing plesures of a world to be enjoyed, he must chuckle as he murmurs: give the devil his due.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Christian, War, Night

  W. Somerset Maugham (2008). “The Razor's Edge”, p.226, Random House

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• Where Young must torture his invention To flatter knaves, or lose his pension.

  Jonathan Swift

  Knaves, Flattery, Invention

  Jonathan Swift (1823). “The select works of Jonathan Swift ...: containing the whole of his poetical works ... embellished with engravings”, p.55

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• Congress's definition of torture in those laws - the infliction of severe mental or physical pain - leaves room for interrogation methods that go beyond polite conversation.

  John Yoo

  Pain, Law, Definitions

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• If an enthusiastic, ardent, and ambitious man marry a wife on whose name there is a stain, which, though it originate in no fault of hers, may be visited by cold and sordid people upon her, and upon his children also: and, in exact proportion to his success in the world, be cast in his teeth, and made the subject of sneers against him: he may, no matter how generous and good his nature, one day repent of the connection he formed in early life; and she may have the pain and torture of knowing that he does so.

  Charles Dickens

  Children, Pain, Men

  "Oliver Twist".

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• Hell is not in torture; Hell is in an empty heart.

  Khalil Gibran

  Passion, Heart, Hell

  Khalil Gibran “Selected Short Works of Khalil Gibran”, Library of Alexandria

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• SORCERY, n. The ancient prototype and forerunner of political influence. It was, however, deemed less respectable and sometimes was punished by torture and death.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Death, Punishment, Political

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.209, 谷月社

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• Basically I can't sleep without every single song I'm writing repeating endlessly, but I'm loving it again. Embracing the torture, as I'm assaulted by my own thoughts. Like a locust giving birth to earworms. Eeeeew!

  Lady Gaga

  Song, Writing, Sleep

  "It's 'LG5 Time': Lady Gaga teases new album and little monsters are going crazy" by Christina Garibaldy, www.mtv.com. August 04, 2015.

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• Writing a book is like torture that you don't know, but after it's done and there it is. It's a joy like unlike anything else, I think it's the closest that a man can come to knowing what is feels like to have a baby.

  Harry Crews

  Baby, Book, Writing

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• Heartbreak has an archetypal core, all heartbroken individuals suffer from the same kind of torture.

  Ginette Paris

  Heartbreak, Heartbroken, Betrayal

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• I mean, we've had all these awful pictures from the prison in Iraq and these sort of memos floating around about justifying torture, all this kind of stuff. And it makes you want to take a shower, you know?

  Ron Reagan

  Mean, Iraq, Floating

  "Larry King Live", edition.cnn.com. June 23, 2004.

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• 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.

  Peter Kropotkin

  Party, Men, Prison

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• The nurse knocked softly on the door of the examining room and wheeled in a shiny silver tray displaying neatly arranged instruments of torture.

  Jennifer Echols

  Doors, Nurse, Rooms

  Jennifer Echols (2009). “The Ex Games”, p.168, Simon and Schuster

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• Each human being can at once be a fighter and forgiver. When self-doubt tortures him, he most play the role of a fighter. And when his own ignorance humiliates him, he must play the role of a forgiver.

  Sri Chinmoy

  Ignorance, Self, Play

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• Animals do feel like us, also joy, love, fear and pain but they cannot grasp the spoken word. It is our obligation to take their part and continue to resist the people who profit by them, who slaughter them and who torture them.

  Denis de Rougemont

  Pain, Animal, People

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• The horrors of Vivisection have supplanted the solemnity, the thrilling fascination, of the old unetherized operation upon the human sufferer. Their recorded phenomena, stored away by the physiological inquisitor on dusty shelves, are mostly of as little present use to man as the knowledge of a new comet or of a tungstate of zirconium ... -contemptibly small compared with the price paid for it in agony and torture.

  Henry Jacob Bigelow

  Knowledge, Science, Men

  "Surgical Anaesthesia: Addresses and Other Papers". P. 309. Book by Henry Jacob Bigelow, 1894.

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• I pretty much drink a cup of coffee, write in my journal for a while, and then sit at a computer in my office and torture the keys. My one saving grace as a writer is that, if I'm having trouble with the novel I'm writing, I write something else, a poem or a short story. I try to avoid writer's block by always writing something.

  Jess Walter

  Block, Coffee, Writing

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• When something in life occurs that is troubling, we are supposed to not dwell on the thing itself. Instead, the focus should be on our obligation to turn this bad thing into something beautiful. It's not easy. But, if you focus your creative energy away from self-torture and onto ‘how you can turn this into something beautiful’ pretty remarkable things start to happen.

  Matt Smith

  Beautiful, Self, Focus

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• Why had we let it go? Why had we both been condemned...to an exile among dreary strangers who had made us give up all desire for rest, for friendship, for the sound of human voices? Could I now reclaim a single hour spent talking to my brother, Philip, and give it to Ken Daggart? Who made it our duty to accept, as the only reward for our work, the gray torture of pretending love for those who roused nothing but contempt?

  Ayn Rand

  Brother, Giving Up, Talking

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