Torture Quotes - Page 31

• We reject techniques like torture regardless of whether they're effective or ineffective because they are barbaric and harmful on a broad scale. It's the same thing with cyber warfare. We should never be attacking hospitals. We should never be taking down power plants unless that is absolutely necessary to ensure our continued existence as a free people.

  Edward Snowden

  People, Technique, Warfare

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The United States military is now using the music of Metallica and other heavy metal bands to break the will of Saddam Hussein supporters to get them to talk. Theyre blaring heavy metal music at them. That should make the artist feel pretty good, huh? Put your heart and soul into your last CD and the Army is using it to torture people.

  Jay Leno

  Military, Heart, Army

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• To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill treatment, indignities, profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, and the wretchedness of the vanquished.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Self, Ill Treatment, Profound

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• If any mention was made of homicide, madness, adultery, and intolerable tortures, we would let the church-bells ring louder, the church-organ swell its peal and drown the hideous sound. The sugar they raised was excellent: nobody tasted blood in it.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Church Bells, Blood, Sound

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald A. Bosco, Joel Myerson (2015). “Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.277, Harvard University Press

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• Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the delusion of masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the assurance that, even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave and torture a man.

  H. L. Mencken

  Women, Hard Times, Law

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.40, Vintage

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• It is cruelty to children to keep five-year-olds sitting still, gazing into vacancy even for one hour at a time. We have little idea of the torture we thus inflict.

  Ellen Swallow Richards

  Children, Years, Ideas

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• Of course,Behaviourism 'works'. So does torture.

  W. H. Auden

  Doe, No Nonsense, Courses

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• One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without intermission.

  W. H. Auden

  Discovery, Wish, Important

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• If one writes or reads novels from the point of view of psychology, it is very inconsistent and petty to want to shy away from even the slowest and most detailed analysis of the most unnatural lusts, gruesome tortures, shocking infamy, and disgusting sensual or spiritual impotence.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Spiritual, Writing, Views

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• Time is never more misspent than while we declaim against the want of it; all our actions are then tinctured with peevishness. The yoke of life is certainly the least oppressive when we carry it with good-humor; and in the shades of rural retirement, when we have once acquired a resolution to pass our hours with economy, sorrowful lamentations on the subject of time misspent and business neglected never torture the mind.

  Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann

  Time, Retirement, Mind

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• The woman movement is one which is uniting by co-operating influences, all the antagonisms that are warring on the family state. Spiritualism, free love, free divorce, the vicious indulgences consequent on unregulated civilization, the worldliness which tempts men and women to avoid large families, often by sinful methods, thus making the ignorant masses the chief supply of the future ruling majorities; and most powerful of all, the feeble constitution and poor health of women, causing them to dread maternity as--what it is fast becoming--an accumulation of mental and bodily tortures.

  Catharine Beecher

  Family, Powerful, Divorce

  Catharine Esther Beecher (1871). “Woman Suffrage and Woman's Profession”, p.9

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• White men should exhibit the same insensibility to moral tortures that red men do to physical torments.

  Theophile Gautier

  Men, White, Red

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• My religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative revolution. I desire that no public monument or work of art or inscription or sermon or ritual service commemorating me shall suggest that I accepted the tenets peculiar to any established church or denomination nor take the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacrifice.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Religious, Art, Sacrifice

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• Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the scheme of things.... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound.

  Dorothy H Cohen

  Children, Order, Giving

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• Popular Christianity has for its emblem a gibbet, for its chief sensation a sanginary execution after torture, for its central mystery is an insane vengeance bought off by a trumpery expiation. But there is a nobler and profounder Christianity which affirms the sacred mystery of equality and forbids the glaring futility and folly of vengeance.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Insane, Execution, Sacred

  George Bernard Shaw (2008). “Pygmalion and Major Barbara”, p.41, Bantam Classics

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• The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians who, being burned at the stake, suggested new modes of tortures to their tormentors. Being superior to physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they were superior to any consolation which the missionaries could offer; and the law to do as you would be done by fell with less persuasiveness on the ears of those who, for their part, did not care how they were done by, who loved their enemies after a new fashion, and came very near freely forgiving them all they did.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Fashion, Law, Forgiving

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “Citizen Thoreau: Walden, Civil Disobedience, Life Without Principle, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown”, p.53, Graphic Arts Books

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• The Singapore judicial system's shameful recourse to using torture - in the form of caning - to punish crimes that should be misdemeanors is indicative of a blatant disregard for international human rights standards, one of the defendants said that sentencing day was the darkest day of his life, but in reality every day that Singapore keeps caning on its books is a dark day for the country's international reputation.

  Phil Robertson

  Life, Country, Book

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• Sometimes you'll see interviews about an actor who was asked to hit the weight room to develop his body for the character, and you hear them complaining about the egg white omelettes they had to eat and the tortures of hitting the gym twice a day - I find that to be a bit saddening, it's all a part of becoming the character and as an actor, that is your job.

  James Preston Rogers

  Jobs, Character, Eggs

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• Pointe shoes are torture devices. I mean, ballerinas get used to it, but it was definitely a new experience for me. They feel medieval. I was very happy to stop wearing them.

  Natalie Portman

  Mean, Shoes, New Experiences

  Source: www.mirror.co.uk

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• The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions. No music, except coming through earphones, or played in theaters. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Art, Government, Freedom Of Speech

  Interview with Alvin Toffler, reprints.longform.org. January 1964.

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• The creative process is a very collaborative process. I know it might seem that way because so much ink is spilled and the media is obsessed with business and numbers and studios... but filmmakers don't think of it that way. We just go off and we tell our stories. It's the same torture that we adore, it's the same torture that our forefathers endured making movies in the golden era of Hollywood. So, from my perspective it's no different, I'm sure, from the men and women who I admire so much who made the earliest movies.

  Steven Spielberg

  Men, Thinking, Numbers

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• Writing helped to have jobs that involved running around, pushing things like dish carts and wheelbarrows. It would be hard to sit at a desk all day, and then come to sit at another desk. Also, it helps to abandon hope. If I sit at my computer, determined to write a New Yorker story I won't get beyond the first sentence. It's better to put no pressure on it. What would happen if I followed the previous sentence with this one, I'll think. If the eighth draft is torture, the first should be fun. At least if you're writing humor.

  David Sedaris

  Running, Jobs, Fun

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• The US has attacked countries like Grenada, Panama, Libya... the list of victims of US terrorism is almost infinite. And the US government's participation in torture, whether in El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile... is well-documented and widely known.

  Assata Shakur

  Country, Government, Guatemala

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• I often went to bed without supper cause I hated my mother's cooking. So, to go to bed without supper was not a torture to me. If she was gonna hurt me, she'd make me eat.

  Maurice Sendak

  Mother, Hurt, Cooking

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• To bear all kinds of tortures without a murmur of resentment is not possible for a human being without the strength that comes from God.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  God, Bears, Resentment

  Surendra Varmā, Mahatma Gandhi (1970). “Metaphysical Foundation of Mahatma Gandhi's Thought”

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