Ritualised child sexual abuse is about abuse of power, control and secrecy. Ten years ago many people found it difficult to believe that fathers actually raped their children, yet survivors of such abuses spoke out...

[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.

Torture when inflicted on childrenbecomes indefensible. Even among those who believe that torture is a defensiblepractice to extract information, the case for inflicting pain and abuse upon childrenproves impossible to support.

The silkiness of his voice was a torturous caress that I could have endured for the rest of my life.

This is not to condone torture, which is still prohibited by the Torture Convention and federal criminal law.

For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls , drop after drop after drop, like...

Das war ein Vorspiel nur; dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.”(Almansor)

The words were pulled from her, agonizing, like a disembowelment.

When Lisa awoke she was back in the cell on the floor covered in her own blood, dirt, and urine. And that was only day 1.

Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin), your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.Is it possible that you do not know what a hostage really is — a man imprisoned not because of...

How could tickling, even though it causes laughter, be at the same time such a vicious form of torture?Sitting on the edge of my bed, I thought it through.I came to the conclusion, at last,...

A quick smile, a nod of recognition, a hearty laugh, these are the sorts things you can do to make people feel welcomed as you keep them locked up in your torture dungeon.

Welcome my new paranoia, if you are not my reality, so where the hell is the fucking reality!?!?! To be or not to be?! this is the paranoia of my sweet dreams. So you are...

My reign is not yet over… you live, and my power is complete. Follow me; I seek the everlasting ices of the north, where you will feel the misery of cold and frost to which...

It comes from history. It comes from the record of the Inquisition, persecuting heretics and torturing Jews and all that sort of stuff; and it comes from the other side, too, from the Protestants burning...

Many governments employ torture but this was the first time that the element of Saturnalia and pornography in the process had been made so clear to me. If you care to imagine what any inadequate...

I don’t torture myself.

Here’s a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard,...

Death was not the scariest thing out there; no, the denial of it could be far worse.

To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.

This is the truth about The Killer, ain’t it baby? You’re just a big ol’ bag of screams under all that big, bad muscle, ain’t you?

Schmerz ist Wahrheit; alles andere wird angezweifelt.

I want to open a broken marriage repair shop. I’m not a counselor or psychologist, but I am a fan of the magical bonding that occurs between two people when duct tape binds them together...

You give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.”(Larry King Live, May 11, 2009)

So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I’ve learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled “file and forget,” and...

A range of reasons to go with a range of individuals, my dear: some wish to restore lost glories, some wish to alter the status quo, some wish to bring harm to others. In my...

Different people have different ideas. We need to kill them—the ideas, not the people. The people we just need to torture.

We made love like two smiles torturing a frown. My advice is to put it on the rack, and really stretch out the event.

But I think I’m broken too. I just don’t know it yet.

His kindness was only meant to make later torments crueler.

You can’t have occupation and human rights.

The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to...

As far as he could discover, there were no signs of spring. The decay that covered the surface of the mottled ground was not the kind in which life generates. Last year, he remembered, May...

Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness.

The fears we keep alive, will be a recurring haunt until it dies, or we do.

A man does not have to feel less than human to realize his sin; oppositely, he has to realize that he gets no special vindication for his sin.

I’d rather have a career that utilizes my creativity, but torturing people all day long is not a bad gig. At least not for me.

It’s a good thing I’m not the president, because I would prosecute everybody who was involved in that torture, I would prosecute the people who did it, I would prosecute the people who ordered it...

… sleep deprivation is an illegal torture method outlawed by the Geneva Convention and international courts, but most of us do it to ourselves.

Sometimes it’s torturous to think of things we can’t possibly have.

The ultimate weapon is Lady Gaga’s music. Why kill the enemy when you can play her music and they’ll want to kill themselves?

To list all the great discoveries in the field of science and medicine during the past century, such as aspirin, insulin, penicillin, and the streptomycin drugs would require the undivided attention of a medical historian...

Wild dreams torment me as I lie. And though a god lives in my heart, though all my power waken at his word, though he can move my every inmost part – yet nothing in...

I wanted to punch him and understand him at the same time.

I got hold of a copy of the video that showed how Saddam Hussein had actually confirmed himself in power. This snuff-movie opens with a plenary session of the Ba’ath Party central committee: perhaps a...

My hobbies include rubbing my nipples across a cheese grater, meeting cat ladies on Tinder, and voting for either Democrat or Republican every four years. You could say I am a torture enthusiast.

In cases of distasteful occupation, the second day is generally worse than the first; we return to the rack with all the soreness of the preceding torture in our limbs.

What does it take to break a person?Torturers and interrogators would be able to provide statistics. This many nights without sleep, this many needles, this much water, this voltage of current on this many occasions....

Nothing will shake a man-or at any rate a man like me-out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only...

One should let one’s nails grow for a fortnight. O, how sweet it is to drag brutally from his bed a child with no hair on his upper lip and with wide open eyes, make...