Less than fifteen per cent of the people do any original thinking on any subject. The greatest torture in the world for most people is to think.
We do, and there is a law in the United States – the Torture Convention – that prohibits the United States from deporting an individual to a country where there is a reasonable expectation that he will be subjected to torture – physical, mental or otherwise.
Human beings make use of torture when they get chaotic and confused. And Americans certainly got chaotic, vengeful and confused after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
I ran through most of college and ran through most of grad school. When I was writing my dissertation for my Ph.D., it was literally the only hour of the day that I wasn’t working. It was nine months of torture, but I made sure I got out to run.
Women like to be scared, but they don’t like the blood and the gore, and especially movies that have violence and torture involving women. Women don’t want to see that, I can tell you for damn sure right now.
The Bush administration will go down in history as the Torture Team.
Torture and cruelty are the words that come to mind when people think of the Tower. Here it was that the princes were murdered, Guy Fawkes racked and Henry VIII’s queens executed.
Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.
Marriage is an exercise in torture.
There’s been a lot of experience with torture in history. It doesn’t work.
I think when you have lawyers arguing over whether you can keep a detainee at 46 degrees… for two hours, that’s not torture. It may be unpleasant, it may be coercive… but let’s say what torture actually is, and that’s not it.
I feel like the thing that I’ve learned a lot is when you’re involved in something, you don’t always get to appreciate it for what it is as much. You’re focused on the details and how you can make it better. It’s kind of torture.
Shamefully we now learn that Saddam’s torture chambers reopened under new management, U.S. management.
When you have to get into the character each morning, give it your voice, your face, it was torture.
I think most diets are torture, which is why I don’t believe in them. But, as is true with exercise, when you make a change and feel the benefits, you want to stick with it.
I torture my mother with all my problems, that poor woman.
I think there would be less torture with a warrant requirement than without one.
Torture, including practices like waterboarding, violates the legal and moral standards of all civilized nations.
I am on a strict diet now and medication. It’s torture, I simply cannot eat every two hours, which is the way all nutrition plans work these days. I lose weight but the minute I start eating again, I rapidly put it back.
Even if torture works, what is the point of ‘defending’ America using a tactic that is a fundamental violation of what America ought to mean?
On March 5, 2011, protesters stormed the Egyptian state security headquarters. In real time, activists shared their discoveries on Twitter as they moved through a building that had until recently been one of the Mubarak regime’s largest torture facilities.
I was never one of those actors who believed, ‘I’m so gonna be an ingenue.’ I already knew that wasn’t gonna happen, and I decided not to torture myself with it.
The purpose of torture is not getting information. It’s spreading fear.
While the notion that torture works has been glorified in television shows and movies, the simple truth is this: torture has never been an effective interrogation method.
Not all the Americans in Iraq are those who torture and murder, or course they’re not, I don’t know how many are doing it, I know it is systematic throughout the United States military I think that’s been revealed.
Even the classics that we read to our young children are full of wolves’ fangs and burning ovens and bloody feet and ice shards piercing hearts. Even the New Testament climaxes with an act of unspeakable torture. Might as well just read to our kids from the Amnesty Annual Report and be done with it.
Writing, directing – it’s just torture every time and it doesn’t seem to get any easier. And yet I love them and I’m not going to stop doing them.
Guantanamo is still open, but it’s unlikely that serious torture is going on at Guantanamo. There is just too much inspection.
No, no, I don’t watch football. The last time I tried watching was the last Super Bowl. The problem I have is, you know, the graphic nature of my imagination; when I watch and see them meeting head onto head, helmet onto helmet, what flashes through my mind is what’s going on in their brains. It’s like torture to me.
Animal rights activists talk about cruelty and torture, some backing their assertions by publishing out-of-date photographs of ‘experiments’ banned long ago. This is a misrepresentation. The work we do is performed with compassion, care, humanity and humility. I have never seen an animal suffer pain.
I don’t believe that we should limit waterboarding – or, quite frankly, any other alternative torture technique – if it means saving Americans’ lives.
Torture fails to make us safe, but it certainly makes us less free.
My 70 days of torture began in Camp India. The camps in Gitmo are named by letters. A is for Alpha, B for Beta, C for Charlie and so on. I is for India. It is a torture block.
I suppose what’s happened recently has confirmed suspicions I voiced in the book, and I think made clearer some of those things that I point out. For instance I have a section of the book where I talk about the possibility of torture.
If you back out of a convention… you can’t dodge your obligation. Torture is still not acceptable.
The use of torture on suspected terrorists after Sept. 11 has already earned a place in American history’s hall of shame, alongside the Alien and Sedition Acts, Japanese internment during World War II, and the excesses of the McCarthy era.
Waterboarding isn’t torture. We do waterboarding to our own soldiers in the military.
The rule of the game was never assume that anybody, however honorable, would be able to stand up under torture. If Mr. X, who knew where I was, was caught for some reason, I should move.
The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
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.
You know, in my music career there was a moment where the irony was just so heavy. There were people in my audience that were the reason I developed neuroses. These people that tortured my life were using my art, my poetry, as fuel for them, to torture other people.
Surely martyrs, irrespective of the special phase of the divine idea for which they gladly give up their bodies to torture and to death, are the truest heroes of history.
Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment, naive as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to bless, to love, to build, to forgive and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate.
The concert is a polite form of self induced torture.
No matter how bad you make the torture scenes, the reality was much worse. Because you cannot put on screen 70 days and nights with no sleep. And this is the easiest part of the torture.
The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story.
