Douglas Coupland Quotes

It makes me actually quite angry to think about people writing about torture with a sort of relish. Horrible.

The norm was to kill everyone who was kidnapped. And anyone kidnapped was tortured … torture didn’t always work. It left people too destroyed …Torture is eternal. It has always existed and always will. It is an essential part of the human being …. Not one innocent person passed through my hands.

It has always worried me that certain men of the Church have not understood that torture is never humane or Christian.

It would be ugly to watch people poking sticks at a caged rat. It is uglier still to watch rats poking sticks at a caged person.

The cruelties committed against the Hottentots exceed everything that is said about it in Cape Town or what can be imagined.

Very cruel punishments are inflicted in some of the convict camps, such as scores of lashes on the bare back, for slight offences. Women also are brutally flogged.

The very word torture is a disgrace to the human race.

Oligarchy is to the advantage of the rich. Democracy to the advantage of the poor.

[Spaniards] made bets as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off his head at one blow; or they opened up his bowels. They tore the babies from their mother’s breast by their feet, and dashed their heads against the rocks … They spitted the bodies of other babes, together with their mothers and all who were before them, on their swords. They hanged Indians by thirteens, in honor and reverence for our Redeemer and the Twelve Apostles …. They burned the Indians alive …. All this did my own eyes witness.

The smack of the whip is all day long in the ears of those who are on the plantation, or in the vicinity; and it is used with such dexterity and severity as not only to lacerate the skin, but to tear out small portions of the flesh at almost every stroke. This is THE GENERAL TREATMENT of the Slaves. But many individuals suffer still more severely. Many are knocked down; some have their eyes beaten out; some have an arm or a leg broken, OR CHOPPED OFF; and many, for a very small or for no crime at all, have been BEATEN TO DEATH.

Wherever a colored person was to be found, he or she was whipped till the blood formed pools at their feet and were threatened with death if they did not cease screaming in pain.

…the inflicting of pain, physical or mental, to extract confessions or statements... is widespread throughout the country.

Torture was necessary to maintain slavery. It was integral to slavery. You cannot have slavery without some torture or the threat of torture; and you cannot have torture without slavery. You cannot imprison a free man forever unless you have broken him; and you can only forcibly break a man's soul by torturing it out of him. Slavery dehumanizes; torture dehumanizes in exactly the same way. The torture of human beings who have no freedom and no recourse to the courts is slavery.

Guys like the Monarch are not unique, and there are guys like him all over the world torturing dumb scientists.

Anyone who reads '33 Men' will be brought into a world that was practically a textbook case of sensory deprivation and torture.

There were two Avoxes with me in prison. Darius and Lavinia, but the guards mostly called them the redheads. They'd been our servants in the Training Center, so they arrested them, too. I watched them being tortured to death. She was lucky. They used too much voltage and her heart stopped right off. It took days to finish him off. Beating, cutting off parts. They kept asking him questions, but he couldn't speak, he just made these horrible animals sounds. They didn't want information, you know? They wanted me to see it.

They tied his arms behind his back to teach him how to swim, they put blood in his coffee and milk in his gin.

The brutalization of humans by other humans never fails to get to me in some angry-making way. It shot up in me like an explosion.

Humans are insane. We kill our own people, starve our own people, sell them, work them to death, beat them, don't give them affordable/free/good healthcare, and let them live in misery, while a few of us have - we have all we want. We are evil.

No conditions justify torture.

Regrettably, it has become clear that torture of detainees in United States custody is not limited to Abu Ghraib or even Iraq. Since Abu Ghraib, there have been increasing reports of torture.

It's very hard to accept that stoning still exists in the world today.

Many instances of persecution and killing have occurred in countries with atrocious human rights records such as Sri Lanka, Guatemala and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

About the only difference between the poor and the rich, is this, the poor suffer misery, while the rich have to enjoy it.

In the name of noble purposes men have committed unspeakable acts of cruelty against one another.