Torture has been privatized now, so you have obviously the whole scandal in America about the abuse of prisoners and the fact that, army people might be made to pay a price, but who are the privatized torturers accountable too?
It troubled me that we had these reports of torture of detainees, we had people jailed at Guantanamo Bay who couldn't even talk to their lawyers and couldn't see the evidence against them - sort of fundamental bedrock civil liberties things.
Citizens of Rome might boast that the claim of 'Civus romanus sum' set them apart from barbarians and slaves, and it was true up to a point, but Roman citizens lived in a society that accepted pain, cruelty, and torture as the norm, and in which there was no suggestion of equality at birth or mercy in the afterlife.
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.
'We don't torture' is the anguished cry of squishy people who have decided that trying to frighten terrorists by roughing them up is somehow the very definition of torture.
Death, torture and prison are part of daily life for the youth of Iran. They are not like us, my friends and I at their age; they are not scared. They are not what we were. They hold hands and scream: 'Don't be afraid! Don't be afraid! We are together!' They understand that no one will give them their rights; they must go get them.
Chess is mental torture.
In life eternal, there is perfect joy and light, without pain or torture, and there is communion with God Himself and His angels.
This is not to condone torture, which is still prohibited by the Torture Convention and federal criminal law.
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.
Animal rights activists talk about cruelty and torture, some backing their assertions by publishing out-of-date photographs of 'experiments' banned long ago.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.
The war against terrorism is a war against those who engage in torture.
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.
It is also asserted that the election settled the matters of the war and the torture of prisoners. These are dead issues that no longer need be addressed.
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.
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.
And I've known people who came out with a sense of torture.
'24' glamorizes torture. I don't think there's any other way of putting it.
What girls do to each other is beyond description. No chinese torture comes close.
In the future, torture will once again become the recreational sport of the rich.
I had the misfortune of getting what skateboarders call hippers. It's when you fall on your hip again and again and again, just the same spot. It turns into like a blue purple bruise and it's just torture because I had to keep on doing the same move, going around in the pool again.
If you are sentenced to torture for a crime, yes, that is a cruel punishment. But the mere fact that somebody is tortured is - is unlawful under - under our statutes, but the Constitution happens not to address it, just as it does not address a lot of other horrible things.
I torture my mother with all my problems, that poor woman.
The concert is a polite form of self induced torture.
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.
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.
When stuck years ago in a job I hated, my only friend was the public bench. As the tedious mornings dragged on, how I would long for the lunch hour, when I would be able to escape the torture of the office and stroll over to the churchyard and into the comforting wooden embrace of one of its benches.
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.
If in my youth I had realized that the sustaining splendour of beauty of with which I was in love would one day flood back into my heart, there to ignite a flame that would torture me without end, how gladly would I have put out the light in my eyes.
Judges must beware of hard constructions and strained inferences, for there is no worse torture than that of laws.
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.
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.
When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of those gyms their scary-looking gym equipment, and they're going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture.
I maintain the importance of an absolute prohibition against torture, while acknowledging that even absolute prohibitions can sometimes be broken. If that is a contradiction, it is a contradiction that ethics has to embrace, or else it becomes like glass: hard, clear, but fatally inflexible.
This stuff on enemy combatants, the Bush Administration has fought like a tiger to avoid having to produce any evidence to a judge to show why somebody is locked up in perpetuity. Another example of that is the torture scandal.
I am an artist, and I understand the pros and cons of being an artist, and the pressures of being an artist, and how much being an artist can be torture to people around you; you know, you friends and your family and how material you can be, and how it's hard to take criticism and all the things like that.
