Torture Quotes

The nostalgia of a moment's love can be an illusionary precipice from which we fall from truth; in heartbreak, what we escape to in the past is what tortures us in the present.

Mike Norton

Those darling byegone times, Mr Carker,' said Cleopatra, 'with their delicious fortresses, and their dear old dungeons, and their delightful places of torture, and their romantic vengeances, and their picturesque assaults and sieges, and everything that makes life truly charming! How dreadfully we have degenerated!

Charles Dickens

I've already told you: the only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure.

Marquis de Sade

Nothing will shake a man-or at any rate a man like me-out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.

C.S. Lewis

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

Thomas Jefferson

The universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable torture-garden. Passions, greed, hatred, and lies; law, social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering.

Octave Mirbeau

Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.

E. M. Cioran

It was well said by Jean Tarrou in The Plague, I think that attendance at lectures in an unknown language will help to hone one's awareness of the exceedingly slow passage of time. I once had the experience of being 'waterboarded' and can now dimly appreciate how much every second counts in the experience of the torture victim, forced to go on enduring what is unendurable.

Christopher Hitchens

Wild dreams torment me as I lie. And though a god lives in my heart, though all my power waken at his word, though he can move my every inmost part - yet nothing in the outer world is stirred. thus by existence tortured and oppressed I crave for death, I long for rest.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.

Christopher Hitchens

It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians.

Henrik Ibsen

The community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.

Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Und

They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me-then they will have my dead body, not my obedience.

Mahatma Gandhi, (attributed, fro

We must all die. But that I can save him from days of torture, that is what I feel as my great and ever new privelege. Pain is a more terrible lord of mankind than even death himself.

Albert Schweitzer, On the Edge o

There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him.

Umberto Eco

This exists. It can be seen. It can be touched. These in pace, these dungeons, these iron hinges, these necklets, that lofty peep-hole on a level with the river's current, that box of stone closed with a lid of granite like a tomb, with this difference, that the dead man here was a living being, that soil which is but mud, that vault hole, those oozing walls, --what declaimers!

Victor Hugo

Man torturing man is a fiend beyond description. You turn a corner in the dark and there he is. You congeal into a bundle of inanimate fear. You become the very soul of anesthesia. But there is no escaping him. It is your turn now...

Henry Miller

Whipping and abuse are like laudanum; you have to double the dose as the sensibilities decline.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom

Answers to leading questions under torture naturally tell us nothing about the beliefs of the accused; but they are good evidence for the beliefs of the accusers.

C.S. Lewis

The healthy man does not torture others -- generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

Carl Gustav Jung