Colson Whitehead Quotes

The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness.

There is no dignity for either the sufferer or the torturer

I've put my friends and family through the wringer over the years, I have to say, by doing unspeakable things to people, not the least of which was pulling out poor George Clooney's fingernails in Syriana.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Could you have seen that mother clinging to her child, when they fastened the irons upon his wrists; could you have heard her heart-rending groans, and seen her bloodshot eyes wander wildly from face to face, vainly pleading for mercy; could you have witnessed that scene as I saw it, you would exclaim, Slavery is damnable!

Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes.

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.

I never imagined what it would be like to spend a 12-hour day crying and covered in blood.

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

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

When my father was arrested, we didn't know where they had him. My mother found him at the house of torture. It was called Villa Triste.

I was arrested three times and tortured once.

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

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 and everyone eventually confesses under torture.

Torture arises in societies afflicted with a culture of dehumanization.

Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured, but we can reduce the number of tortured children.