Torture Quotes

Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself. (James Anthony Froude)
It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians. View quote
Henrik Ibsen
In the name of Hippocrates, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival. View quote
Luis Buñuel
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. View quote
Charles Krauthammer
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. View quote
Maurice Sendak
In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders. View quote
John Updike
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. View quote
Umberto Eco
Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procreates turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture. View quote
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
CLARIONET, n. An instrument of torture operated by a person with cotton in his ears. There are two instruments that are worse than a clarionet two clarionets. View quote
Ambrose Bierce
What girls do to each other is beyond description. No chinese torture comes close. (Tori Amos)
When love grows diseased, the best thing we can do is to put it to a violent death. I cannot endure the torture of a lingering and consumptive passion. View quote
George Etherege
Judges must beware of hard constructions and strained inferences, for there is no worse torture than that of laws. View quote
Francis Bacon
To me, torture would be watching sports on television. View quote
Quentin Tarantino
The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers. View quote
Carl Jung
It's the boredom that kills you. You read until you're tired of that. You do crossword puzzles until you're tired of that. This is torture. This is mental torture. View quote
Jack Kevorkian
Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason. View quote
Octavio Paz
To put meaning in one's life may end in madness, But life without meaning is the torture Of restlessness and vague desire-It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid. View quote
Edgar Lee Masters
The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why. View quote
James Joyce
The suffering caused by the terrorists is the real torture. (Jean-Marie Le Pen)
Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action, a superior mind exists in torture. View quote
Charles Cooley
Brave men do not gather by thousands to torture and murder a single individual, so gagged and bound he cannot make even feeble resistance or defense. View quote
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
Yet it is awful to love a person who is a torture to you. And a fascinating person who loves you and won't hear of anything but your loving him and living right by his side through all eternity! View quote
Agnes Smedley
Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything. View quote
Gregg Easterbrook