#torture

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. ↗

— John Updike

#children #decided #education #equipped #fathers

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. ↗

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

#alike #chiefly #endures #however #intensity

The entire affective world, constructed over the years with utmost difficulty, collapses with a kick in the father's genitals, a smack on the mother's face, an obscene insult to the sister, or the sexual violation of a daughter. Suddenly an entire culture based on familial love, devotion, the capacity for mutual sacrifice collapses. Nothing is possible in such a universe, and that is precisely what the torturers know… From my cell, I'd hear the whispered voices of children trying to learn what was happening to their parents, and I'd witness the efforts of daughters to win over a guard, to arouse a feeling of tenderness in him, to incite the hope of some lovely future relationship between them in order to learn what was happening to her mother, to get an orange sent to her, to get permission for her to go to the bathroom. ↗

— Jacobo Timerman

#esma #sadism #sexual-abuse #torture #family

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. ↗

— Ida B. Wells

#brave #brave men #cannot #defense #even

They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me. Then they will have my dead body, but not my obedience. ↗

— Mahatma Gandhi

#satyagraha #torture

I've been wanting to do that for a very long time," I growled Victor smiled through the pain and the blood. "Of course you have. I used to think Belikov was the savage one, but it's really you, isn't it? You're the animal with no control, no higher reasoning except to fight and kill." I clenched his shirt and leaned him over him. "Me? I'm not the one who tortured Lissa for my own benefit. I'm not the one who turned my daughter Strigoi. And I'm sure as hell not the one who used compulsion to kidnap a fifteen-year-old girl! ↗

— Richelle Mead

#hathaway #rose #victor #torture

People think I'm crazy to put myself through such torture, though I would argue otherwise. Somewhere along the line we seem to have confused comfort with happiness. Dostoyevsky had it right: 'Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.' Never are my senses more engaged than when the pain sets in. There is a magic in misery. Just ask any runner. ↗

— Dean Karnazes

#suffering #torture

How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is. ↗

— Erich Maria Remarque

#war #torture

Oh, I have feelings for him, all right. I'd like to put him in the ground myself, believe me. Still, it would be wrong. Promise me." "Fine. I promise I won't kill him." He said it too easily. My eyes narrowed. "Promise me right here and now that you will also never cripple, maim, dismember, blind, torture, bleed, or otherwise inflict any injury to Danny Milton. Or otherwise stand by while someone else does as you watch." "Blimey, that's not fair!" he protested ↗

— Jeaniene Frost

#torture

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. ↗

— Edgar Lee Masters

#boat #end #life #longing #madness