Ruth Rendell Quotes

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.

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.

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.

Those who tortured me had no right to inflict such humiliation on a human being, physically upon my person, and morally upon themselves.

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

I do not wish to sit at the same table with a bunch of torturers.

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

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

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.

I think the suffering, violence and cruelty and Guantanamo and the rest is going to go on and on in Iraq.

Through my mind, is just the horror of these people. I had been held by them, I knew how violent they were.

Never mind a world that can't see past brutality.

I was arrested three times and tortured once.

Anyone and everyone eventually confesses under torture.

Torture arises in societies afflicted with a culture of dehumanization.

The Negro's and Negro Women are inhumanly treated, are two-thirds naked, and are very disgusting to the Eye and another Sense, Tho I begin to be more habituated to the Sight, yet I cannot be to the great Cruelty made Use of to the poor ignorant Wretches.

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

[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.

They promptly tore his fingernails out and he started telling things.

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.

Human beings can do some God-awful things to other human beings

In rushed a Body of Hellhounds—not content with cutting him and stabbing him in several places, they drew a cord round his neck until his Tongue was forced out—It they cut off and three fingers of his right hand—Then they cut out his wife’s tongue and … with a case knife cut off her thumb and four of her fingers one after another. She I fear cannot recover. There was in the house a brother of hers about 14 years old … his tongue, those merciless Villains cut out and cut the calf of his leg with a sword.

Every kind of atrocity was inflicted upon their captives. They hung up the noblest and best-looking women naked, cutting off their breasts and stitching them to their mouths, so that the women appeared to be eating them and after this they impaled them on sharp stakes, run up the body.

In the future, torture will once again become the recreational sport of the rich.