Torture Quotes - Page 25

• Attorney General John Ashcroft has earned himself a remarkable distinction as the Torquemada of American law. Tomás de Torquemada...was largely responsible for...[the] torture and the burning of heretics — Muslims in particular. Now, of course, I am not accusing the Attorney General of pulling out anyone's fingernails or burning people at the stake (at least I don't know of any such cases). But one does get the sense these days that the old Spaniard's spirit is comfortably at home in Ashcroft's Department of Justice.

  Walter Cronkite

  Home, Law, People

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• Hence when a person is in great pain, the cause of which he cannot remove, he sets his teeth firmly together, or bites some substance between them with great vehemence, as another mode of violent exertion to produce a temporary relief. Thus we have the proverb where no help can be has in pain, 'to grin and abide;' and the tortures of hell are said to be attended with 'gnashing of teeth.'Describing a suggestion of the origin of the grin in the present form of a proverb, 'to grin and bear it.'

  Erasmus Darwin

  Pain, Together, Vehemence

  Erasmus Darwin (1818). “Zoonomia”, p.330

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• The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Military, Men, Secret

  "Correspondance Napoleon" edited by Henri Plon, Vol. V, No. 3605, (p. 128), 1861.

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• I am excessively slothful, and wonderfully industrious-by fits. There are epochs when any kind of mental exercise is torture, and when nothing yields me pleasure but the solitary communion with the 'mountains & the woods'-the 'altars' of Byron. I have thus rambled and dreamed away whole months, and awake, at last, to a sort of mania for composition. Then I scribble all day, and read all night, so long as the disease endures.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Depression, Exercise, Night

  Edgar Allan Poe (2006). “The Portable Edgar Allan Poe”, p.488, Penguin

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• A healthy-minded boy should feel hearty contempt for the coward and even more hearty indignation for the boy who bullies girls or small boys, or tortures animals.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Girl, Animal, Boys

  Theodore Roosevelt, Paul H. Jeffers (1998). “The Bully Pulpit: A Teddy Roosevelt Book of Quotations”, p.19, Taylor Trade Publications

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• We have found ways... to torture and maim animals and make their lives a misery, almost a living hell... in the multinational food industry... and in laboratories where often the most important thing being researched is the latest in lipstick or face cream.

  David Oderberg

  Animal, Vegetarianism, Important

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• You become a monk and you practice and the teacher tells you what to do. If you find that you have a resistance to that, and the resistance is strong, it just means you're not interested. Why put yourself through some sort of torture. It means you weren't that interested.

  Frederick Lenz

  Teacher, Strong, Mean

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• When you know what's most important to you, making a decision is quite simple. Most people, though, are unclear about what's most important in their lives, and thus decision making becomes a form of internal torture.

  Tony Robbins

  Motivational, Simple, People

  Tony Robbins (2012). “Awaken The Giant Within”, p.400, Simon and Schuster

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• Do things with your whole heart, with as much intensity as you are capable of. Anything done halfheartedly never brings joy to life. It only brings misery, anxiety, torture, and tension, because whenever you do anything halfheartedly you are dividing yourself into two parts, and that is one of the greatest calamities that has happened to human beings - they are all split.

  Rajneesh

  Motivational, Heart, Two

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• One of the keys to learning for me has been to not get so hung up on the past. It's important to remember the past, but that doesn't mean you have to torture yourself with it by reliving it every single day.

  Georges St-Pierre

  Mean, Past, Keys

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• The Great War differed from all ancient wars in the immense power of the combatants and their fearful agencies of destruction, and from all modern wars in the utter ruthlessness with which it was fought... Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one vast battlefield on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke and ran. When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and they were of doubtful utility.

  Winston Churchill

  Christian, War, Struggle

  "The World Crisis, Volume I: 1911-1914". Book by Winston Churchill, 1923.

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• IF you torture a single chicken and are caught, you're likely to be arrested. If you scald thousands of chickens alive, you're an industrialist who will be lauded for your acumen.

  Bill Vaughan

  Acumen, Alive, Chickens

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• Everywhere and always, since its very inception, Christianity has turned the earth into a vale of tears; always it has made of life a weak, diseased thing, always it has instilled fear in man, turning him into a dual being, whose life energies are spent in the struggle between body and soul. In decrying the body as something evil, the flesh as the tempter to everything that is sinful, man has mutilated his being in the vain attempt to keep his soul pure, while his body rotted away from the injuries and tortures inflicted upon it.

  Emma Goldman

  Struggle, Men, Evil

  "The Failure of Christianity". "Mother Earth" Journal, April 1913.

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• You would not easily guess All the modes of distress Which torture the tenants of earth; And the various evils, Which like so many devils, Attend the poor souls from their birth.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Evil, Soul, Earth

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Illustrated)”, p.209, Delphi Classics

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• The hopelessness of the Turkish Government should make me witness with delight its being swept out of the countries which it tortures. Next to the Ottoman Government nothing can be more deplorable and blameworthy than jealousies between Greek and Slav and plans by the States already existing for appropriating other territory. Why not Macedonia for the Macedonians as well as Bulgaria for the Bulgarians and Serbia for the Serbians?

  William E. Gladstone

  Country, Government, Greek

  "Mr. Gladstone and The Balkan Confederation". "The Sunday Times" Newspaper, February 6, 1897.

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• 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.

  Felix Frankfurter

  Men, Judging, Ignorant

  "Watts v. Indiana, 338 U.S. 49". U.S. Supreme Court case, supreme.justia.com. June 27, 1949.

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• The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Love, Acts Of Love, Surgery

  "Intimate Journals: Fusées". Book by Charles Baudelaire, 1867.

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• Torture, as the art of discovering the truth, is barbaric nonsense; it is the application of a material means to a spiritual end.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Spiritual, Art, Mean

  Charles Baudelaire (1919). “Baudelaire, His Prose and Poetry”

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• Let none falter who thinks he is right, and we may succeed. But if, after all, we shall fail, be it so: we still shall have the proud consolation of saying to our consciences, and to the departed shade of our country's freedom, that the cause approved of our judgment and adored of our hearts, in disaster, in chains, in torture, in death, we never faltered in defending.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Country, Heart, Thinking

  Abraham Lincoln (2012). “The Complete Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln (Biographically Annotated Edition)”, p.196, Jazzybee Verlag

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• The best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with H-bombs might possibly put an end to the human race. It is feared that if many H-bombs are used there will be universal death, sudden only for a minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration.

  Bertrand Russell

  War, Race, Majority

  Bertrand Russell, Andrew G. Bone (2003). “Man's Peril, 1954-55”, p.319, Psychology Press

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• I have seen these ways of God: I know of no reason For fire and change and torture and the old returnings.

  Robinson Jeffers

  Fire, Way, Reason

  Robinson Jeffers, Albert Gelpi (2003). “The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers”, p.46, Stanford University Press

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• I had a hard time watching "Wolf Creek." It is a film with one clear purpose: To establish the commercial credentials of its director by showing his skill at depicting the brutal tracking, torture and mutilation of screaming young women. When the killer severs the spine of one of his victims and calls her "a head on a stick," I wanted to walk out of the theater and keep on walking.

  Roger Ebert

  Hard Times, Skills, Directors

  Roger Ebert's review of "Wolf Creek", www.rogerebert.com. December 22, 2005.

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• Suspense is torture ... but delightful--or there'd be no gambling in the world.

  Ada Leverson

  Gambling, Suspense, World

  Ada Leverson (1907). “The Twelfth Hour”

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• What has gone wrong with the men who are ruling I'd like to know who they think they are fooling They told us that torture was over and gone but everyone knows the same torture goes on

  Peter Weiss

  Men, Thinking, Goes On

  Peter Weiss (1993). “Peter Weiss' The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat: As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade [a Play]”

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• I especially denounce the terrible mass murders, which I cannot understand. I never ordered any killing or tortures where I had the power to prevent such actions!

  Hermann Goring

  Goering, Action, Murder

  Closing statement to the Nuremberg tribunal on August 31, 1946. "Witness to Nuremberg" by Richard Sonnenfeldt, p. 70, 2006.

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