Inflicting Quotes

#1. They call war an art, but it isn't. It largely consists in outwitting people, robbing widows and orphans, and inflicting suffering on the helpless for one's own ends - and that's not art: that's business.

Kenneth Roberts

#2. To injure an opponent is to injure yourself. To control aggression without inflicting injury is the Art of Peace.

Morihei Ueshiba

#3. There is not a more powerful weapon upon this earth capable of inflicting more damage, pain and suffering than a betrayal of the heart.

Mark Boyer

#4. Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.

J.K. Rowling

#5. We encourage others to find a local Earth raper and make them pay for the damages they are inflicting on our communities ... Furriers, meat packers, bosses, developers, rich industry leaders are all Earth rapers . We must inflict economic sabotage on all Earth rapers.

Craig Rosebraugh

#6. To me, I see scars of courage. Inflicting them gave him the strength to survive the pain that's plagued him all his life. I'm grateful to every one of them because he's still here, with me.

Nicola Haken

#7. Instead of inflicting these horrible punishments, it would be far more to the point to provide everyone with some means of livelihood, so that nobody's under the frightful necessity of becoming first a thief and then a corpse.

Thomas More

#8. She's a human being, just like me. Frail and faulty and flawed, capable of making the most heinous mistakes and inflicting the most severe pain. But equally capable of the greatest love.

Sarah Ockler

#9. We are our own wicked gods with little 'g's' and big dicks, sadistic and constantly inflicting a slow demise.

Marilyn Manson

#10. I think you have to remember that Americans saw their purpose as so innately good that they could excuse the pain they would inflict on others to carry out those purposes. Because the purposes were so good, they would justify this pain we were inflicting on other people.

Neil Sheehan

#11. Blacksmiths sometimes twist a rope tight around the nose of a horse, and by thus inflicting a little pain they distract his attention from the shoeing process. One way to get air out of a
glass is to pour in water. Be Absorbed by Your Subject

Dale Carnegie

#12. Courage is continuing to perform your daily tasks, and being hopeful despite the odds, not inflicting your fears on others, and remaining sensitive to their needs and expectations, and also not supposing, because you're dying, nothing matters any more.

Leonard Michaels

#13. I have no intention of inflicting all my childhood memories on anyone. Far less do I want to excoriate my old teachers who, in their bungling, unforgettable way, exposed me to the natural world, a world covered in chitin, where implacable realities hold sway.

Annie Dillard

#14. I cannot be with someone who takes pleasure in inflicting pain on me, someone who can't love me.

E.L. James

#15. A new sickness invaded Jerry, the sickness of knowing what he had become, another animal, another beast, another violent person in a violent world, inflicting damage, not disturbing the universe but damaging it.

Robert Cormier

#16. What kind of world results if the power to dominate and control others, inflicting enormous suffering in the process, is sanctioned by a divine being who can at the same time redeem that suffering and release the perpetrators and their victims from that world's evils?

John Lamb Lash

#17. PILLORY, n. A mechanical device for inflicting personal distinction - prototype of the modern newspaper conducted by persons of austere virtues and blameless lives.

Ambrose Bierce

#18. There is not the slightest question but that the God of the Old Testament is a jealous, vengeful God, inflicting not only on the sinful pagans but even on his Chosen People fire, lighting, hideous plagues and diseases, brimstone, and other curses.

Steve Allen

#19. Yes, I am a bloodthirsty little thing. No, I don't have any problem inflicting violence when I deem it necessary. Yes, 'when I'm pissed' falls under the necessary column.

Annie Anderson

#20. We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children, between the ugliness of hate and the will to oppose it. Between inflicting suffering and humiliation on our fellow man and offering him the solidarity and hope he deserves. Or not.

Elie Wiesel

#21. There are few uglier traits of human nature than this tendency - which I now witnessed in men no worse than their neighbours - to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of inflicting harm.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#22. I am told that the majority of Iraqis wanted Saddam removed from power, but they were unwilling and were incapable of doing the job themselves because they feared Saddam and knew the pain and torture he was capable of inflicting upon them.

Howard Coble

#23. I have learned that in a long life we all eventually play the part of the betrayed, and we all eventually play the part of the betrayer, and neither is pleasant because both roles involve pain, inflicting or absorbing it.

Robert Wagner

#24. What they don't tell you about the illusion
is that I am as much lion as I am lion tamer.
And I got good at inflicting pain the same way I got good
at soothing it.
This, we call unfortunate,
but inevitable.

Ashe Vernon

#25. Someone who is permanently surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.

Susan Sontag

#26. Our losses ... have reached an intolerable level. The enemy air force played a decisive role in inflicting these high losses.

Karl Donitz

#27. To me this is a dangerous doctrine, which justifies inflicting real pain in the here and now on disadvantaged people on the basis of forestalling a distant possibility of doom.

Matt Ridley

#28. Villainy was not simply the red raging glory of inflicting well-deserved pain; it was also the curdling knowledge of having inflicted injustice. A villain simply did not care. Only the victims did.

Meredith Duran

#29. People who seem to enjoy their ill-temper have a way of keeping it in fine condition by inflicting privations on themselves.

George Eliot

#30. Punk Funk means to be one with yourself. To be rebellious, aggressive, able to do and say what you feel at all times, without inflicting mental or spiritual pain.

Rick James

#31. Finn gave a soft laugh. 'What's so funny?' 'I think you're the first person to actually apologise for inflicting pain. Usually it's someone's hobby.

Tabitha McGowan

#32. If someone is confronting our essential liberties, if someone is inflicting injuries and harm, by God I'll confront them!

Margaret Thatcher

#33. Cyber weapons provide the tantalising possibility of being able to cripple the enemy without inflicting lasting damage on them.

Philip Hammond

#34. Discipline is essential to life, whether you are administering or inflicting the spanking.

Martin Short

#35. Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.

Graham Greene

#36. Something terrible has happened to the soul of the Republican Party. We've gone from bad economic doctrine. We've even gone beyond selfishness and special interests. At this point we're talking about a state of mind that takes positive glee in inflicting further suffering upon the already miserable.

Paul Krugman

#37. There's never going to be an end to suffering if 'he deserves it' is all the justification people need for inflicting pain.

Ken Liu

#38. So it was done to the general contentment; and if Gruff and Glum didn't in the course of the afternoon splice the main brace, it was not for want of the means of inflicting that outrage on the feelings of the Infant Bands of Hope.

Charles Dickens

#39. Most rebellions and revolutions end up with the oppressed group coming to power and inflicting the same evils they endured on some new group that they are now oppressing, I argued. Violence, hoarding power and resources, that's the basic human M.O.

Norman Ollestad

#40. Non-violence confronts systematic injustice with active love, but refuses to retaliate with further violence under any circumstances. In order to halt the vicious cycles of violence, it requires a willing acceptance of suffering and death rather than inflicting suffering or death on anyone else.

John Dear

#41. Most of the time, I wasn't interested in inflicting pain on myself and others unless it was in a way that would make people think about the way they act, the society they live in or the things they take for granted.

Marilyn Manson

#42. Torture when inflicted on children
becomes indefensible. Even among those who believe that torture is a defensible
practice to extract information, the case for inflicting pain and abuse upon children
proves impossible to support.

Henry A. Giroux

#43. To oblige a friend by inflicting an injury on his enemy is often more easy than to confer a benefit on the friend himself.

Anthony Trollope

#44. I am increasingly attracted to restricting possibility in the poem by inflicting a form upon yourself. Once you impose some formal pattern on yourself, then the poem is pushing back. I think good poems are often the result of that kind of wrestling with the form.

Billy Collins

#45. Fortune is not satisfied with inflicting one calamity.

Publilius Syrus

#46. Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.

George Orwell

#47. The heart is a weapon - a self-inflicting weapon - that if not trained properly, can destroy a person.

E.K. Blair

#48. Nothing a man suffers will prevent him from inflicting suffering on others. Indeed, it will teach him the way

Barry Unsworth

#49. A cruel critic has never made anything; his glibness is a way of inflicting his emptiness on others.

John Lahr

#50. When humans behave murderously, such as inflicting senseless slaughter of innocents in warfare, we like to blame it on some dark, 'animalistic' instinct.

Frans De Waal

#51. I've always hoped 'Chopped' would telegraph our enormous affection and love and admiration for chefs and food, but at the same time, we are inflicting extraordinary cruelty on them.

Ted Allen

#52. In other words, our decision making in medicine has failed so spectacularly that we have reached the point of actively inflicting harm on patients rather than confronting the subject of mortality. If end-of-life discussions were an experimental drug, the FDA would approve it. Patients

Atul Gawande

#53. There's a difference between early and late abortions. If you have a late abortion, where the fetus might feel pain, then I think you should have a good reason. Because then you're inflicting pain. As you go through the third trimester, you need to have more serious reasons to end a pregnancy.

Peter Singer

#54. It is always difficult to escape from youth; its hopefulness, its optimistic belief in the privileges of desire, its despair, and its sense of outrage and injustice at disappointment, all these spring on a man inflicting indelicate agony when he is no longer prepared.

Margery Allingham

#55. Wit is a weapon. Jokes are a masculine way of inflicting superiority. But humour is the pursuit of a gentle grin, usually in solitude.

Frank Muir

#56. We are evolving as one species - not only as Americans, Syrians, Russians, Chinese, and jihadists. We cannot attack one without inflicting forms of violence and destruction upon ourselves. This is our new reality.

Gary Zukav

#57. Sovereignty must not be used for inflicting harm on anyone, whether citizen or foreigner.

Ludwig Von Mises

#58. When you see a threat, you just can't hope for the best in this day and age, where terrorists are capable of inflicting damage on the homeland.

George W. Bush

#59. It is the nature of human that we tend to pass our pain along. As if we could get rid of it by inflicting an equal hurt on someone else.

Robin Hobb

#60. The eurozone status quo is neither tolerable nor stable. Mainstream economists would call it an inferior equilibrium; I call it a nightmare - one that is inflicting tremendous pain and suffering that could be easily avoided if the misconceptions and taboos that sustain it were dispelled.

George Soros

#61. King= a man who excels in inflicting injury to others until he terrorizes everybody into submission

Bangambiki Habyarimana

#62. Why bother inflicting enormous pain on yourself when sooner or later Life would certainly get around to doing it for you?

Jeff Lindsay

#63. Inflicting emotional distress has typically been treated as a civil action. How 'substantial' does the distress have to be for it to turn criminal?

Nancy Gibbs

#64. Instead of inflicting upon us the judgment we deserved, God in Christ endured it in our place.

John Stott

#65. She had always loved to tease and considered it an irony of her life that she was often drawn to men who didn't recognize teasing even when she was inflicting it on them.

Larry McMurtry

#66. Dr. Arnold ... the admired reformer of public schools, came across some cranks who thought it a mistake to flog boys. Anyone reading his outburst of furious indignation against this opinion will be forced to the conclusion that he enjoyed inflicting floggings.

Bertrand Russell

#67. Children are contemptuous, haughty, irritable, envious, sneaky, selfish, lazy, flighty, timid, liars and hypocrites, quick to laugh and cry, extreme in expressing joy and sorrow, especially about trifles, they'll do anything to avoid pain but they enjoy inflicting it: little men already.

Jean De La Bruyere

#68. Anger was so much better than fear. To be the one inflicting pain was better than being in pain yourself.

Karina Halle

#69. If God is not sending earthquakes, destroying economies and inflicting pain upon human beings, what is God doing? God works through people, calling them to help their neighbors in need. God comforts His people, walking with them even 'through the valley of the shadow of death.'

Adam Hamilton

#70. They cannot degrade Frederick Douglass. The soul that is within me no man can degrade. I am not the one that is being degraded on account of this treatment, but those who are inflicting it upon me ...

Frederick Douglass

#71. For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history.

Michael Pollan

#72. In the end that Face which is the delight or terror of the universe must be turned upon each of us either with one expression or with the other, either conferring glory inexpressible or inflicting shame that can never be cured or disguised.

C.S. Lewis

#73. In 1984 the lust for power is satisfied by inflicting pain; in Brave New World, by inflicting a hardly less humiliating pleasure.

Aldous Huxley

#74. To me, cruelty is the worst of human sins. Once we accept that a living creature has feelings and suffers pain, then by knowingly and deliberately inflicting suffering on that creature, we are guilty, whether it be human or animal.

Jane Goodall

#75. Speaking psycho-analytically, it may be laid down that any "great ideal" which people mention with awe is really an excuse for inflicting pain on their enemies. Good wine needs no bush, and good morals need no bated breath.

Bertrand Russell

#76. I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me.

Vladimir Nabokov

#77. People caused harm to others because they were of malevolent disposition, that was shear human wickedness. something that has always existed and always would.Some people it seemed derived pleasure from inflicting suffering on others ...

Alexander McCall Smith

#78. As for inflicting our sorrow on other people, one does not want to go around blathering and crying all the time. But perhaps it is our gift to others to trust them enough to share our feelings with them. It may help them deal with some of their own.

Martha Whitmore Hickman

#79. What we call evil sometimes depends on point of views. The one at the receiving end calls it evil while the inflicting party considers it the best thing he can do.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

#80. Because love is the greatest scam of all time. And because as much as I fucking love you, I hate you for inflicting it upon me!

J.A. Redmerski

#81. And that's just the beginning. More and more, conventional wisdom says that the responsible thing is to make the unemployed suffer. And while the benefits from inflicting pain are an illusion, the pain itself will be all too real.

Paul Krugman

#82. The Church of Christ has been founded by shedding its own blood, not that of others; by enduring outrage, not by inflicting it. Persecutions have made it grow; martyrdoms have crowned it.

St. Jerome

#83. [..] it has remained for man alone among all creatures to kill senselessly and wantonly for the mere pleasure of inflicting suffering and death.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

#84. Unkindness is inspired by hatred, anger fuels it into action in which there is no great joy; it would take sadism to turn it into something pleasurable; unkind people imagine themselves to be inflicting pain on someone equally unkind.

Marcel Proust