"Your ears you keep, so that every shriek of every child shall be yours to cherish—every babe that weeps in fear at your approach, every woman that cries ‘Dear God, what is that thing?’ will reverberate forever with your perfect ears."
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"Only cowards torture women."
— Patricia Briggs (Raven's Shadow)

"Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or tortuous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive."
— Joanne Harris (Chocolat)

"Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness."
— Poppy Z. Brite

"إذا خفيت عنا الحكمة في العذاب أحيانا.. فلأننا لا ندرك كل شيء ولا نعرف كل شيء، ولا ندرك من القصة إلا تلك المرحلة المحدودة بين قوسين اسمها الدنيا.. أما ما قبل ذلك ومابعد ذلك فهو بالنسبة لنا غيب محجوب.. ولذا يجب أن نصمت في احترام ولانطلق الأحكام.."
— مصطفى محمود

"Not returning phone calls is the severest form of torture in the civilized world."
— Marisha Pessl (Special Topics in Calamity Physics)

"Always mystify, torture, mislead, and surprise the audience as much as possible."
— Don Roff

"The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"
— George Orwell (1984)

""The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul.""
— John Calvin

""I release the pain,
of a thousand tortured souls.""
— Karen Anderson Miller

"It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies."
— Theodor W. Adorno

"Schmerz ist Wahrheit; alles andere wird angezweifelt."
— J.M. Coetzee (Warten auf die Barbaren)

"The widespread abuse of prisoners is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system--whether political, religious or economic--that is rejected by large numbers of the people they are ruling. Just as ecologists define ecosystems by the presence of certain "indicator species" of plants and birds, torture is an indicator species of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections."
— Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism)

"Die Folter war [...] praktizierte Schutzpflicht des Souveräns für seine Untertanen."
— Heribert Prantl (Der Terrorist als Gesetzgeber. Wie man mit Angst Politik macht)

"Der Lebensschutz des potentiellen Opfers soll mehr wiegen als die Menschenwürde des potenziellen Täters."
— Heribert Prantl (Der Terrorist als Gesetzgeber. Wie man mit Angst Politik macht)

"Foltern zerstört die zivile Basis des Zusammenlebens."
— Heribert Prantl (Der Terrorist als Gesetzgeber. Wie man mit Angst Politik macht)

"Anyone even remotely suspect was interrogated, because interrogation is by far the most effective method of speedily banishing inappropriate thoughts from the mind.
"
— Olli Jalonen

"Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn't happened to you yet, consider yourself lucky. When it does, when one day you look around and nothing is recognizable, when you find yourself alone in a dark wood having lost the way, you may find it easier to blame it on someone else -- an errant lover, a missing father, a bad childhood -- or it may be easier to blame the map you were given -- folded too many times, out-of-date, tiny print -- but mostly, if you are honest, you will only be able to blame yourself.

One day I'll tell my daughter a story about a dark time, the dark days before she was born, and how her coming was a ray of light. We got lost for a while, the story will begin, but then we found our way."
— Nick Flynn (The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009)

"Once you have been tortured, you can never belong in this world. There is no place that ever be your home."
— Roma Tearne (Mosquito)

"Some say that it is lack of imagination which makes men and women brutes. May it not be power of imagination? The interest of torturing is lessened, is almost lost, if we can not be the tortured as well as the torturer."
— Robert Smythe Hichens (the Return of the Soul and Other Stories)

"It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
"
— Thomas Jefferson