James Clavell 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.

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

When it comes to how the slaves treat each other: If you've been brutalized all your life - if you have seen your children sold or your mother beaten and raped and you have been tortured yourself - you are not going to be up for your best behaviour. Even in the 21st century, 100 people in the midst of terrible suffering are not going to be their best people.

So much torture, bloodshed, deceit. You cannot make your young people practice torture twenty-four hours a day and not expect to pay a price for it.

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.

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

I've been water-boarded, and I speak from experience, and it's torture.

The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

The psychology of brutality was worse than the beatings.

The doctor punched my vein, the captain called me Cain, upon my belly sat the sow of fear.

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.

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

He whipped her to make her scream and then he whipped her to make her hush.

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

It’s all torture.

I got beat up my whole life.

The occupation is really terrible on a variety of levels. It's terrible on the "shooting people and torturing people in prison" level. But I think the thing that is very hard to convey is that it's also this bureaucratic grinding-down and daily humiliation that I think would probably be as horrible as the spectacular violence.

Violence is the ultimate human degradation.

I find that truly heartbreaking that, like, it's such a common, constant thing in people's lives - a brutal abuse of people by other people, and it's just accepted.

We suffer with those who have disappeared, those who have had to flee their homes, and those who have been tortured.

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.

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

Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life.