Torture Quotes - Page 27

• Religion has never befriended the cause of humaneness. Its monstrous doctrine of eternal punishment and the torture of the damned underlies much of the barbarity with which man has treated man; and the deep division imagined by the Church between the human being, with his immortal soul, and the soulless "beasts", has been responsible for an incalculable sum of cruelty.

  Henry Stephens Salt

  Men, Soul, Church

  "Seventy Years Among Savages". Book by Henry Stephens Salt, 1921.

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• What makes this so remarkable is that this is the first time the United States is accountable for its record on torture with regard to some of the practices implemented after 9/11.

  Jennifer Daskal

  Practice, United States, Records

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• Nobody would say the cowshed was heaven and nobody would say the inhuman torture of so many victims be called a revolution of the proletariat. ... A museum should be established to remind China of the follies and disasters that had fallen from 1966 to 1976. We cannot forget what had happened and history should not repeat itself.

  Ba Jin

  Museums, Heaven, Revolution

  "Pioneers of Modern China: Understanding the Inscrutable Chinese". Book by Khoon Choy Lee, 2005.

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• Man, full of emptiness and torn apart with homesickness for the desert has had to create from within himself an adventure, a torture-chamber, an unsafe and hazardous wilderness- this fool, this prisoner consumed with longing and despair, became the inventor of 'bad conscience'.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Adventure, Men, Despair

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2006). “Nietzsche: 'On the Genealogy of Morality' and Other Writings Student Edition”, p.57, Cambridge University Press

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• Divorce is simply modern society's version of medieval torture. Except it lasts longer and leaves deeper scars. A divorce releases the most primitive emotions; the ugliest, raw feelings. Emotionally wounded people do their best to inflict pain upon the other party, but rather than using claws they use divorce lawyers.

  William Shatner

  Pain, Party, Divorce

  William Shatner (2009). “Up Till Now”, p.136, Pan Macmillan

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• The new CIA torture report is 6 million pages long. It's almost as long as a George Clooney pre-nup.

  David Letterman

  Long, Pages, Cia

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• Child labor, not a problem. Censorship, not a problem. Torture, not a problem. Chewing gum in China - oh, my God! You better not be over here chewing gum.

  David Letterman

  Children, Gum, Censorship

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• If you believe Jesus ever had a good word for war or torture or tax cuts for the rich, or raping the earth, or refusing water to dying migrants, then you might as well believe bunnies lay painted eggs.

  Bill Maher

  Jesus, War, Believe

  "HBO Real Time" with Bill Maher, votesmart.org. March 31, 2006.

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• If the knowledge of torture of others makes you sick, it is a case of sympathy... It can be argued that behaviour based on sympathy is in an important sense egoistic, for one is oneself pleased at others' pleasure and pained at others' pain, and the pursuit of one's own utility may thus be helped by sympathetic action.

  Amartya Sen

  Pain, Sick, Religion

  Amartya Kumar Sen (1997). “Choice, Welfare and Measurement”, p.92, Harvard University Press

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• It must be observed that fishing with any living bait is to be condemned for the same reason as fishing with a worm: in all such instances we torture two animals at once for our amusement.

  Thomas Young

  Animal, Lakes, Sea

  Thomas Young (1798). “An Essay on Humanity to Animals”, p.90

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• Anglers boast of the innocence of their pastime; yet it puts fellow-creatures to the torture. They pique themselves on their meditative faculties; and yet their only excuse is a want of thought.

  Leigh Hunt

  Sea, Fishing, Rivers

  Leigh Hunt (1859). “Works”, p.38

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• To large numbers of American citizens life in certain parts of the country becomes intolerably hazardous. They may be seized on any pretext, however flimsy, and put to death with horrible tortures. No government pretending to be civilized can go on condoning such atrocities. Either it must make every possible effort to put them down or it must suffer the scorn and contempt of Christendom.

  H. L. Mencken

  Country, Government, Lynching

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• Thanks to the toleration preached by the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, the sorcerer is exempt from torture.

  Honore de Balzac

  Atheism, Thanks, Century

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• From Augustine down, theologians have tried to compel people to accept their special interpretation of the Scripture, and the tortures of the inquisition, the rack, the thumb-screw, the stake, the persecutions of witchcraft, the whipping of naked women through the streets of Boston, banishment, trials of heresy, the halter about Garrison's neck, Lovejoy's death, the branding of Captain Walker, shouts of infidel and atheist, have all been for this purpose.

  Matilda Joslyn Gage

  Atheist, Boston, People

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Brownell Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage (1979). “History of Woman Suffrage”, Ayer Company Pub

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• Some think guts is sprinting at the end of a race. But guts is what got you there to begin with. Guts start back in the hills with 6 miles to go and you're thinking of how you can get out of this race without anyone noticing. Guts begin when you still have forty minutes of torture left and you're already hurting more than you ever remember.

  George A. Sheehan

  Running, Hurt, Thinking

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• Christians have ... identified their opponents, whether Jews, pagans, or heretics, with forces of evil, and so with Satan... Nor have things improved since. The blood-soaked history of persecution, torture, murder, and destruction perpetrated in the name of religion is difficult to grasp, let alohne summarize, from the slaughter of Christians to the Crusades to the Inquisitiion to the Reformation to the European witchcraze to colonialization to today's bitter coflict in the Middle East.

  Elaine Pagels

  Christian, Blood, Names

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• The cruelty of a Fijian god, who, represented as devouring the souls of the dead, may be supposed to inflict torture during the process, is small compared with the cruelty of a God who condemns men to tortures which are eternal.

  Herbert Spencer

  Men, Soul, Atheism

  Herbert Spencer (1920). “The Principles of Sociology”

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• Medievalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods - Medievalism is real Christianity, and the medieval Christ is the real Christ.

  Oscar Wilde

  Real, Passion, Self

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “Epigrams of Oscar Wilde”, p.109, Wordsworth Editions

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• Food is like a torture device because hiking 47 miles a day is hard enough. And then you're trying to get down 6,000 calories a day. Every hour, I needed a snack, every few hours I had to take in a meal and it's just not food, it's fuel. You're not enjoying it - you're seriously shoving it in your mouth and following it with water, juice or Gatorade.

  Jennifer Pharr Davis

  Snacks, Hiking, Water

  "Pharr Davis thrives on trail". Interview with Anna Katherine Clemmons, www.espn.com. July 2, 2013.

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• Who has not seen how women bully women? What tortures have men to endure compared to those daily repeated shafts of scorn and cruelty with which poor women are riddled by the tyrants of their sex?

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Sex, Men, Tyrants

  William Makepeace Thackeray (1848). “Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero”, p.111

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• One of the tortures of jealousy is, that it can never turn away its eyes from the thing that pains it.

  George Eliot

  Jealousy, Pain, Eye

  George Eliot (1860). “Scenes of Clerical Life”, p.120

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• Do you ask what sort of a maid I desire or dislike, Flaccus? I dislike one too easy and one too coy. The just mean, which lies between the two extremes, is what I approve; I like neither that which tortures nor that which cloys.

  Martial

  Lying, Mean, Two

  Martial (1871). “The Epigrams of Martial”, p.55

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• The debility to which Nature condemned women incontestably proves that her design is for man, who then more than ever enjoys his strength, to exercise it in all the violent forms that suit him best, by means of tortures, if he be so inclined, or worse.

  Marquis de Sade

  Mean, Exercise, Men

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• Wit implies hatred or contempt of folly and crime, produces its effects by brisk shocks of surprise, uses the whip of scorpions and the branding-iron, stabs, stings, pinches, tortures, goads, teases, corrodes, undermines.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Iron, Hatred, Scorpions

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1851). “Literature and life, lects”, p.46

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• Duty, though set about by thorns, may still be made a staff supporting even while it tortures. Cast it away, and, like the prophet's wand, it changes to a snake.

  Douglas William Jerrold

  Snakes, May, Thorns

  Douglas William Jerrold (1851). “St. Giles and St. James”, p.277

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