Peter Ustinov Quotes

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

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

Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable.

No conditions justify torture.

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.

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

The truth about torture is that when government agents are given a green light to treat other human beings without the most basic respect for their dignity, they will inevitably engage in abuse. Torture transgresses the most basic of moral principles: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The only way to live with the practice, from the interrogator’s point of view, is to deny the humanity of those being subjected to it.

I don't understand how people can take a gentle, loving life and treat it with such cruelty.

I tattered their wings and tore off their legs, joint by joint, watched them crawl in circles, like little lost infants, untill they decide to die.

Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.

Man torturing man is a fiend beyond description. You turn a corner in the dark and there he is. You congeal into a bundle of inanimate fear. You become the very soul of anesthesia. But there is no escaping him. It is your turn now.

Torture and other forms of cruel or humiliating treatment are an affront to humanity, and the physical and psychological scars can last a lifetime.

Even from far away, I could see people being chased by hellhounds, burned at the stake, forced to run naked through cactus patches or listen to opera music.

We often do to people what people are very comfortable with doing to animals without a second thought.

I haven't decided if he deserved to eat bread made out of sticks or live in a rancid puddle, probably because I haven't made up my mind whether anyone deserves such treatment, though I suspect that the day a person gives up on the Geneva Conventions is the day a person gives up on the human race.

There is no dichotomy between man and God's image. Whoever tortures a human being, whoever abuses a human being, whoever outrages a human being, abuses God's image.

It's not acceptable to torture people for being themselves.

An infallible characteristic of meanness is cruelty.

Love says respect the other as an end unto himself or herself; never use the other as a means. Nobody is a means for you, everybody is an end. But then ambition will flop, and our whole educational system depends on ambitiousness, our politics depends on ambition, our religions depend on ambition.

Beat him until there’s no skin left on his back. If he passes out, wake him and beat him again. (Father) Love you, too, Father. (Acheron)

At some point, we have to stop a force that's going out and drowning people in steel cages and chopping off heads.

No, I do my torturing in the dungeon like any other respectable castle owner.

What I do not know and cannot even hope to understand before I die is why human beings are willfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to each other ... What nerve has atrophied in the torturer, or worse is sensually moved?

Cruelty might be very human and very cultural, but it is not acceptable and it is not an option.

Violence is the ultimate human degradation.