Torture's Quotes

#1. For there's nothing we read of in torture's inventions, Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of intentions.

James Russell Lowell

#2. Forget the noose. Forget the Iron Maiden. Forget the electric chair or the guillotine. The mind was mankind's most painful torture chamber, the blessed liberty to cogitate offering either doom or salvation, depending on one's disposition.

Tiffanie DeBartolo

#3. Just saw a t-shirt at the gym said, body by torture. That's a lot less ironic if you're a political prisoner in the Middle East.

Dov Davidoff

#4. The real form of abuse is not a physical torture; it's mismanagement of purpose by misunderstanding God!

Israelmore Ayivor

#5. Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent's life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy.

Charles Krauthammer

#6. It really is torture to sit around the house and write all day. I'm thinking it might motivate me to finish the book faster, the thought that after it's finished I can return to housecleaning. The

David Sedaris

#7. Though Jesus was in torture on the cross, He thought of praying for His persecutors, of caring for His mother, of securing the good thief's salvation.

Thomas Dubay

#8. The confessional is not a torture chamber, but the place in which the Lord's mercy motivates us to do better.

Pope Francis

#9. Torture gives you reliable and unreliable information. That's the reason why most people in the world don't do it. So this idea that you have to torture people in order to protect national security is a false argument, and I reject it.

John McCain

#10. Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment's torture.

Ayn Rand

#11. I think certain people like to torture me because they think I've had it easier than I actually have and they think: 'Oh, she's got this, she's got that, she's always had everything perfect,' and it's sooo not true.

Mariah Carey

#12. Sometimes it's torturous to think of things we can't possibly have.

Aaron B. Powell

#13. Guantanamo is still open, but it's unlikely that serious torture is going on at Guantanamo. There is just too much inspection.

Noam Chomsky

#14. Images break with a small ping, their destruction is as wonderful as their being, they are essentially instruments of torture exploding through the individual's calloused capacity to feel undifferentiated emotions full of longing and dissatisfaction and monumentality.

E.L. Doctorow

#15. Great! He has indigestion, so let's torture him with cake.

Kristin Cashore

#16. But love is different for every person. For some it's hate, for some it's joy, for some it's fear, for some it's jealousy, for some it's torture, for some it's peace. For some it's everything.

James Frey

#17. I always say that no matter what the torture is, or the tool is, first of all it's nothing worse than what's been done already and that wasn't done by the church and the state for over a period of 250 years during the European witch trials.

Eli Roth

#18. So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl." Old wives' tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is - other people!

Jean-Paul Sartre

#19. President Bush on Monday defended U.S. interrogation of terrorists, saying 'We do not torture.' He added, 'We freedom electrocute.'

Amy Poehler

#20. The reason you write [songs] is because there's something you want to say that is important to you - enough to go through all the torture of writing.

Emmylou Harris

#21. If I had the capabilities of being something other than I am, I would. It's no fun being an artist. You know what it's like, writing, it's torture.

John Lennon

#22. One can have great concern for the people of Ethiopia, but it's another thing to inflict daily torture on the people of England

Steven Morrissey

#23. She did not wish to die, but if torture was the price she had to pay to keep her lover's love, then she only hoped he was pleased that she had endured it. All soft and silent she waited, waited for them to bring her back to him. None

Pauline Reage

#24. It's torture, not being able to talk to him!! She's been so, so worried. How she hopes he's finally doing better now and sleeping soundly.

Elizabeth Scott

#25. I saw the various museum displays including scenes of torture while feeling heartfelt remorse and sorrow over the great pain and suffering inflicted on South Koreans by Japan's colonial rule,

Junichiro Koizumi

#26. That's what's provocative to me - that we can victimize people, we can torture and traumatize people with no consciousness that it is a shameful thing to do.

Bryan Stevenson

#27. Congress's definition of torture in those laws - the infliction of severe mental or physical pain - leaves room for interrogation methods that go beyond polite conversation.

John Yoo

#28. It's convenient how everyone who supports waterboarding and torture, or "enhanced interrogation techniques" as they like to call it, have never experienced it themselves. Yet everyone who has, myself included, are firmly against it.

Jesse Ventura

#29. Dominion is a spy novel, a love story, and also I hope gives some sense of the difficulties faced by dissidents under any totalitarian regime: the threat of imprisonment, torture and death; the threat to one's family, the terror of being alone in a hostile world.

C.J. Sansom

#30. A little bloodthirsty, isn't it? (Kim)
Given what they did to Tory, I'm thinking a quick death is merciful. Not to mention they ruined one of my favorite jackets and totaled my bike. (Acheron)
Well, let's just torture then bomb the bastards. How dare they! (Pam)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#31. I was thinking of love,' I replied in a tone of reproach, 'and here you are talking to me again - forever - about torture!'
'Doubtless! since it's the same thing -

Octave Mirbeau

#32. I find getting my nails done the most tedious thing. I'm such a fidgety person; it's like torture. Everybody loves massages; I don't know what my problem is. I feel like I have to talk to the masseuses.

Anna Kendrick

#33. I love you, Emilia. I love you so goddamned much that I can't breathe when I don't know where you are or how you are doing. This last month has been torture. I wonder if it's possible to have room in my heart for anything else but these feelings.

Brenna Aubrey

#34. What in god's name happened to your nuts?"
"They met a jet-powered water hose."
He grimaced.
"They're already healing."
A rare glint of amusement lit Lawrence's eyes. "You have balls of steel."
"You have inappropriate humour.

Dianna Hardy

#35. Shut up. You don't have to buy a pair of shoes just because you tried them on. They may look great sitting on the shelf, but that doesn't mean they won't feel like medieval torture devices on your feet once you wear them around for a few days. It's the same thing with me. (Lisa)

Cherrie Lynn

#36. ....I came to consider betrayal a moral violation of another's humanity - akin to torture.

Sandra Lee Dennis

#37. The steep decline in America's image and standing after 9/11 is a direct reflection of global distaste for the instruments of American hard power: the Iraq invasion, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, torture, rendition, Blackwater's killings of Iraqi civilians.

Shashi Tharoor

#38. It's the worst form of torture a person can imagine - the wait to die.

Tarryn Fisher

#39. Live with a man 40 years. Share his house, his meals. Speak on every subject. Then tie him up, and hold him over the volcano's edge. And on that day, you will finally meet the man.

Joss Whedon

#40. Torture is banned but in two-thirds of the world's countries it is still being committed in secret. Too many governments still allow wrongful imprisonment, murder or 'disappearance' to be carried out by their officials with impunity.

Peter Benenson

#41. By today's sensibilities, it's more than a little macabre that a great moral movement would adopt as its symbol a graphic representation of a revolting means of torture and execution.

Steven Pinker

#42. You're a man, darling. There's something sick and twisted inside you, making you relish girly torture. I don't understand it myself. Never did.

Linda Kage

#43. He has outsoared the shadow of our night; envy and calumny and hate and pain, and that unrest which men miscall delight, can touch him not and torture not again; from the contagion of the world's slow stain, he is secure.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

#44. 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

#45. That's a weird way to torture yourself. Just watch a movie, over and over, that you hate. That's really funny - that's probably exactly what hell is like.

Rob Huebel

#46. I dream about you every night. It's torture."
"Why torture?"
"Because I wake up knowing I didn't actually touch you.

Edie Harris

#47. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself. And

C.S. Lewis

#48. Torture?" she asked with a laugh. "My first piece of information I'll divulge to you? I wouldn't recommend trying to torture me. I dislike it and grow sulky under pincers.
It's a fault.

Kresley Cole

#49. Torture is how you create enemies, not how you defeat them ... Torture is how you get bad information, not good intelligence. Torture is how you set back America's standing in the world, not how you strengthen it.

Barack Obama

#50. They seal the subway change-booth guy up inside this thing with bullet-proof glass, closed in on all sides, it's like some kind of Houdini torture tank of doom. How do you breathe in there? It looks like if you put your hand over the change slot, you could suffocate him in thirty seconds.

Jerry Seinfeld

#51. 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

#52. We're all afraid of suffering or agony or torture. It's only natural in some ways. It's only human, let's say. I don't know how natural it is. It probably is conditioning.

SARK

#53. The Gucci woman - you know what she's after. The Saint Laurent woman - she's going to torture you a little bit. You might have sex, but she will drip a little hot wax on you first.

Tom Ford

#54. The enslavement, humiliation, torture, and ultimate destruction of thousands upon thousands of human beings for a project for which there was ultimately no purpose is a horror that's very hard to imagine, far less understand.

Richard Flanagan

#55. This must be how I broke through the concrete in Warner's torture chamber. Which means I still have no idea how I broke through the concrete in Warner's torture chamber.

Tahereh Mafi

#56. In Hell, it's our attachments to a fixed identity that torture us.

Chuck Palahniuk

#57. There's an innocence to her still that amazes me. Sometimes I forget she's older than me. Then, I remember that she hasn't gone through what I've gone through.

Zoe Cruz

#58. It's not acceptable to torture people for being themselves.

Ke$ha

#59. You don't have a monopoly on pain or loss. It's a level playing field - we all lose - we all grieve. It's what remains afterwards that defines us. Guilt is the poison we pump into our own veins. It's self-inflicted torture.

R.W. Patterson

#60. I have problems with the violence and the torture on '24.' What I'm trying to say is that that's not the only story, and I think that the cognitive complexity is as important.

Steven Johnson

#61. Body-waxing as a torture-slash-interrogation tactic is illegal under international law. FALSE. (But if the yells coming from Tina Walters's bathroom were any indication, it totally should be true.)

Ally Carter

#62. Telling someone who is manic that she's manic is like telling a dictator that he's a dick. Neither is going to admit it, and both are willing to torture you to prove their points.

Melody Moezzi

#63. People shouldn't stay married because of the kids. That's torture for everyone.

Sofia Vergara

#64. Sometimes it's a comfort to tell the same stories over and over; sometimes it's a torture

Corey Ann Haydu

#65. Finishing is torture ... There's always some newly seen flaw. But the little glimpses of beauty between the anxiety make it worth it.

Jacob Collins

#66. I like things to be really, really funny, or really, really dramatic. Those books are certainly the ones that grab me. I like the exercise of reading through a paragraph, and it's just torture. I try not to have my eyes dart to the right. That's the stuff that I love.

Angie Harmon

#67. I abhor anything that constitutes torture. Water-boarding, it's perfectly clear to me it is torture. I never supported extraordinary rendition to torture, always said that Guantanamo should be closed. There is no clash of ideals and pragmatism there.

David Miliband

#68. This is worth an eternity of torture," he whispered. "I'm quite certain I love you more than anyone I've ever loved, in any life. I may have lost my soul when I was turned, but it's been replaced by you, Cassandra. I'll never let you go.

L.J. Kentowski

#69. Screenwriting is no more complicated than old French torture chambers, I think. It's about as simple as that.

James L. Brooks

#70. It's really fun to go back and forth from acting projects to directing projects. You don't have as much responsibility when you're acting, but you have more fun. But then you miss having that responsibility, and so you go back and torture yourself and make a movie.

Katie Aselton

#71. Nights are the worst. You just don't know what it's like for me, trying not to think of [him] ... knowing that we're going to be apart for so long. It's pure torture.

Judy Blume

#72. For it is discomfort's own essence to be near a man and to feel him in torture of misery, to feel with him the very pain of the misery, and yet to be unable to help.

Richard Llewellyn

#73. Like other Americans, I've reconciled myself to the idea that an animal's life has been sacrificed to bring me a meal of pork or chicken. However, industrial meat production - which subjects animals to a life of torture - has escalated the karmic costs beyond reconciliation.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

#74. Death row is a nightmare to serial killers and ax murderers. For an innocent man, it's a life of mental torture that the human spirit is not equipped to survive.

John Grisham

#75. One man's magic is another man's gluey torture session.

Jackie Earle Haley

#76. From the moment I start a new novel, life's just one endless torture. The first few chapters may go fairly well and I may feel there's still a chance to prove my worth, but that feeling soon disappears and every day I feel less and less satisfied.

Emile Zola

#77. So, then I'll just use Jesse's to torture you some more.

Bella Jeanisse

#78. Has it tortured you as much as it's tortured me?" He asked. "Don't call it torture when it's self-inflicted. You always have a choice.

Donna Lynn Hope

#79. Damn Lyric, it isn't torture. It's travel. Get some sleep."
- Sabine

J.W. Ellis

#80. The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It's not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.

Emil Cioran

#81. How precisely, had a arrived at this? He was taking orders from a spinster, willingly submitting himself to her medieval torture devices. And she wasn't even naked.
-Bram's thoughts

Tessa Dare

#82. It seemed to us philosophically self-evident that suicide was every free person's right: a logical act when faced with illness or senility; a heroic one when faced with torture or the avoidable deaths of others; a glamourous one in the fury of dissappointed love (see: Great Literature).

Julian Barnes

#83. Below me, inside me, there's a pit that's dark and comforting and quite completely insane. If I sink into it, I can be free of all torture.

Karen Marie Moning

#84. Anyone who says forty is the new twenty can suck it - if they can bend over enough to reach it. It's more like the new ninety, because you're now seriously pondering when Death will ring your doorbell in the form of those everyday pains and aches that now torture your once hot, tight body.

Christine Zolendz

#85. I'm not afraid of hard work. I like it! It's the other bit - the not working - I find more problematic. If I'm not busy, I just get antsy. I've been this way since I was a child. Sitting still is like torture for me.

Pixie Lott

#86. And I can't promise anything, you understand, but there's always a chance he'll want to torture your boss anyway. Just recreationally, I mean."
"Wow, that would be terrific," I said.

Robert Kroese

#87. Until the early middle years of the sixteenth century, when King Henry VIII began to quarrel with Rome about the dialectics of divorce and decapitation, a short and swift route to torture and death was the attempt to print the Bible in English. It's

Christopher Hitchens

#88. The thing about cancer is that it can always exceed your worst expectations. There is something pornographic about cancer's ability to confound your imagination. Whatever new obscenity cancer comes up with to torment and torture you, it can always do worse tomorrow.

Tony Parsons

#89. The magic of the revolution had joined with people's fear of death, their horror of torture, their anguish when the first breath of the camps blew on their faces.

Vasily Grossman

#90. Caballero said the CIA's psychological torture methods often degenerated into physical torture, citing a young woman who was stripped, starved, deprived of sleep, beaten, burned, electrically shocked and sexually molested.

Anonymous

#91. 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

#92. An actress, around 40, on television, that's where you get the most torture, I think.

Lisa Kudrow

#93. I would quit while you're ahead. Really. It's an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and you write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it's not any good. I would say just stop now. You don't want to do this to yourself. That's my advice to you.

Philip Roth

#94. It is one of history's great tragedies that American conservatism, born in part in resistance to Soviet torture, should end by endorsing it in America, by Americans.

Andrew Sullivan

#95. My style of singing has always been referred to 'soul' singing when it fact it's more influenced by English R&B Blues Shouting. I'm closer to Led Zeppelin as a vocalist than to Ella Fitzgerald. It was torture dealing with major labels.

Alison Moyet

#96. There's no Hell mentioned in the Old Testament. The punishment of the dead is not specified there. It's only with gentle Jesus, meek and mild, that the idea of eternal torture for minor transgressions is introduced.

Christopher Hitchens

#97. In Sartre's hell, there are no torture devices, no devils. Just the INABILITY to become the person that you are.

Keshni Kashyap

#98. My position on the POW issue has been widely misquoted and taken out of context. What I originally said and have continued to say is that the POW's are lying if they assert it was North Vietnamese policy to torture American Prisoners.

Jane Fonda

#99. Yeah, he'd yield. He was a bad cut of steak left on the open grill too long, though - the general's teeth wouldn't be enough to do the job.

Rhi Etzweiler

#100. I wonder ... if the Republican Party really wants to be branded right now as the party of tax cuts and torture? I mean that's what they're selling.

Chris Matthews